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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
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
×"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
Article submitted by reader
10 November 2020
Ballet Theatre Company of West Hartford is getting “up close” while socially distancing this fall season with its digital performance season titled, “Up Close.”
Two brand new works choreographed by BTC’s Artistic Director, Stephanie Dattellas, will premiere featuring BTC’s Season Dancers, guest dancer Roman Mejia of New York City Ballet, and select members of BTC’s Corps de Ballet. “Up Close: Part 1 – Autumn Aurora” will premiere on Nov. 14 at 7 p.m. followed by “Up Close: Part 2 – Flashes” which will premiere on Nov. 28 at 7 p.m. – both on a digital platform.
Autumn Aurora is a neo-classical ballet set to Vivaldi’s “Autumn” concerto from The Four Seasons. The pre-recorded performance will feature footage taken outside in Winchester, CT, capturing the beautiful and appropriate fall foliage as the backdrop for this ode to the season.
The ballet includes three movements: “Allegro,” “Adagio,” and “La Caccia” – that celebrate change in the colors of leaves and the transition of seasons from summer to autumn. “Allegro” will feature a pas de deux that highlights Vivaldi’s intricate instrumentation and use of repetition playing between the two dancers. “Adagio” features a duet of two female Season Dancers portraying the slower, monotone music complimented in the reflection of autumn colors in a nearby pond. Lastly, “La Caccia” features a sextet of selected BTC Corps de Ballet dancers that showcase power, unison and fleeting moments. Autumn Aurora is sponsored in part by Reid and Riege Attorneys.
Read the full article here.
By Jennifer Stahl
5 November 2020
Now that most dance performances have migrated online, we’re seeing a lot of work that was never meant to be experienced through a laptop screen. Some are streamed in an attempt to capture that thrill of being “live.” Others are filmed from multiple angles so we get shots of the dancers up close. But most choreography that was created for the theater still feels like it would work best…in a theater.
Choreographer Andrea Miller is taking a different approach. Her company, Gallim, had long had an engagement planned at the University of Minnesota’s Northrop theater for this month, and director of programming Kristen Brogdon was committed to finding a way to make it happen. So they started brainstorming options. “I think Kristen was really quick to say, ‘I would love to see BOAT‘—one of the pieces scheduled to tour—’turned into a film,’ ” says Miller.
Miller first made BOAT in 2016 in response to forced migration, exploring the idea of searching for home. “One of the things we wanted our North to be was how having connection is so deeply fundamental to us, and how the loss of that is tragic. Losing someone, or being pulled apart is one of the biggest strains in life,” she says. “It seems like now is a time where that’s very clear to us all.”
There’s also a perpetual presence of a TV and static in the piece; Miller describes it as “having this constant weight of tragedy chewed into bite-size content.”
Although she’d taken part in a handful of film projects before COVID-19 hit, Miller had never before made her own video productions. Then she was commissioned to make a dance film with Ballet Hispánico, then for Works & Process Artists Virtual Commissions, both times working with filmmaker and director Ben Stamper, whom she’d met four years earlier at Grace Farms.
“When you have an opportunity to work with a filmmaker and a director, it’s entering a new creative space,” says Miller. “There’s so much interesting storytelling and perspective that Ben brings to his work that I wanted to open the door for BOAT to become its own work on film. It has connection of course to the original choreography, but isn’t trying to be a re-creation of it.”
Read the full article here.
By Karen Hildebrand
28 October 2020
Who could have predicted that in August 2020 it would be a singularly unique experience to attend a live dance performance? But after more than four months of complete shutdown of live arts and entertainment throughout New York State, the Hudson Valley had entered stage four of reopening, and outdoor gatherings of 50 or fewer were now allowed. When Kaatsbaan Cultural Park in Tivoli announced its festival of free outdoor performances, the nine weekends “sold out” immediately.
With stringent social-distancing protocols in place, and contactless admission instructions and program brochure delivered via email, guests entered a rustic barn to a light-and-sound installation of poetry and images. From there, the barn door opened to a majestic sweep of lush greenery—153 acres that were once a horse farm where Eleanor Roosevelt spent her childhood summers. On a newly built raised stage in the meadow on the third weekend of the series, Robbie Fairchild and Claudia Rahardjanoto tap danced together, Tamisha Guy & Lloyd Knight and Emily Kikta & Peter Walker performed duets, and Christopher Wheeldon, the host, presented a lyrical pas de deux for Fairchild and Chris Jarosz. It was a perfect antidote for the long months of anxious uncertainty.
The Summer Festival was the brainchild of the new generation of leadership at Kaatsbaan. Hired in December 2018, Sonja Kostich is the organization’s first fully dedicated executive director after 30 years of operation under the original founders. Former ABT star Stella Abrera joined her at the helm as artistic director in January 2020. Together they are committed to putting Kaatsbaan on the cultural map as the year-round arts center its founders envisioned long ago.
Read the full article here.
27 October 2020
What does it take to organize a dance festival in the middle of a pandemic? International ballet superstar Diana Vishneva has an answer or two. Her festival of contemporary choreography, Context. Diana Vishneva, currently in its eighth season, is taking place from October 14 to November 29, with live performances at a number of venues in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia. This year, for the first time since its inauguration, the festival also features an impressive online program.
Dance Magazine spoke with Vishneva about the challenges and the rewards of holding this event during the pandemic, her return to the stage of the Mariinsky Theatre and her avid new fan: her 2-year-old son, Rudolf.
We never thought of canceling. Our mission is to support young choreographers, and there were more than 100 applicants this year. We launched our own digital platform to connect with the audience and to have the option to switch to the online-only format, if we had to. A number of live performances had to be postponed until 2021, including Revisor, by Kidd Pivot, and Playback, by Batsheva Dance Company. Fortunately, we were able to present our key live event, the Young Choreographers Competition, which opened the festival on October 14 at the Gogol Center in Moscow. In November, we are planning live performances of two one-act productions, Schaherezade and The Buffoon, by the Perm Ballet, which also will be available for streaming.
This year, we introduced a new digital platform to present online the main events of the festival, including educational programs: master classes, lectures and roundtable discussions. The livestream of our Young Choreographers Competition attracted nearly 100,000 viewers. I was surprised, even shocked, by this number. At first, I thought that there was an extra 0.
We have a brand-new initiative, Context Open, designed to give the opportunity for dancers, choreographers and companies, without restrictions on age, education or citizenship, to create and showcase their work.
We are also exploring unconventional performance spaces, such as museums and industrial buildings. One of the winners of our choreographic competition, Olga Labovkina, adapted her work Air as a piece of “immersion theater,” in which the audience actively participates in the show. It will be performed as part of this year’s festival at Moscow’s Hlebozavod No. 9 (a former bread factory turned into an art space) and St. Petersburg’s Sevkabel Port.
Read the full Dance Magazine article here.
By Lyndsey Winship
12 October 2020
Tamara Rojo may be a great tragic dancer on stage, but in person she is far from the voice of doom. “The performing arts and dance have survived millennia,” she says, sitting in her office looking out onto a floor of empty desks. “They’ve survived pandemics and hundred-year wars and all kind of disasters. Getting together to share stories is intrinsic to humanity. People will gather, live performance will continue to exist.” Just maybe not quite in the way we’re used to, yet.
Ballet is finally putting its pointe shoes back on for a live audience. This month there are performances by the Royal Ballet, Northern Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet – and English National Ballet, where Rojo is artistic director, has just announced two live shows. In November, a live version of their upcoming digital season will feature five new short ballets at Sadler’s Wells, and in December there’s a slimmed-down version of The Nutcracker at the London Coliseum. Christmas isn’t quite cancelled after all.
There will be some drastic differences to pre-Covid shows, with less than half the usual audience (423 at Sadler’s instead of 1,400, and 1,100 at the Coliseum, where ENB usually sell out 2,300 seats). Will it be worth their while financially? “We are trying to find a way to not lose money, that’s all we want to do at this point,” says Rojo. “I passionately believe we need to restart the sector and rehire choreographers and technicians and lighting designers and composers and film-makers so that the engine starts moving, even if it doesn’t make financial sense.”
Making sure there’s still an industry on the other side of this pandemic is Rojo’s main concern. ENB had to furlough 85% of its workforce and many of the staff took pay cuts (20%-25% for most, more for Rojo herself). They haven’t replaced nine dancers who left this year, so the company is reduced in size. But on the upside, ENB’s swanky new Docklands building has seven studios, so there is plenty of room for distancing, and the biggest doubles as a stage, so they can broadcast from there. She thinks the UK’s larger and more established dance companies will be OK in the long term, but it’s the independent artists and freelancers and those working backstage who are in trouble.
“The situation cannot be sustained much longer. The loss of talent and skill breaks my heart,” she says. “The UK’s creative industries are the best in the world, consistently reinventing themselves and at the forefront of everything, it’s the reason for so many of us to be here.” She’s also worried about the ballet world internationally. Talking to directors and dancers in the US, she fears the lack of public subsidy there could mean even big institutions disappearing. “Nobody wants a smaller, less diverse, less interesting ballet world,” says Rojo.
Read the full article here.
By Andrew Welsh-Huggins
12 October 2020
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — For many, it’s not Christmas without the dance of Clara, Uncle Drosselmeyer, the Sugar Plum Fairy, the Mouse King and, of course, the Nutcracker Prince.
But this year the coronavirus pandemic has canceled performances of “The Nutcracker” around the U.S. and Canada, eliminating a major and reliable source of revenue for dance companies already reeling financially following the essential shutdown of their industry.
“This is an incredibly devastating situation for the arts and in particular for organizations like ours that rely on ticket sales from the Nutcracker to fund so many of our initiatives,” said Sue Porter, executive director of BalletMet in Columbus, Ohio.
“The Nutcracker” typically provides about $1.4 million of the company’s $2 million in annual ticket sales, against a $7 million budget. That money goes to school programing and financial aid for dance class students, Porter said. It’s the first year since 1977 that the company isn’t staging the ballet in Ohio’s capital.
The cancellations have meant layoffs, furloughs and salary cuts, with companies relying heavily— sometimes exclusively — on fundraising to stay afloat. Beyond their financial importance, “Nutcracker” performances are also a crucial marketing tool for dance companies, company directors say.
Children often enroll in classes for the chance to dance in the performances as mice, young partygoers and angels, among other supporting roles. For adults, the shows are sometimes their initial experience watching live dance.
“It tends to be the first ballet that people see, the first time they experience attending a production, that thrill when the curtain goes up, the hush of the crowd,” said Max Hodges, executive director of the Boston Ballet. “So for that reason it’s a key part of the pipeline in welcoming audiences into the art form.”
After deciding to cancel this year’s live performances, the Boston Ballet will use archived footage of past performances for a one-hour version to be shown on television in New England. The annual $8 million in “Nutcracker” ticket sales accounts for about 20% of the company’s annual budget.
The pandemic has cost the arts and entertainment industry about 1.4 million jobs and $42.5 billion nationally, according to an August analysis by the Brookings Institution.
The economic vulnerability inherent in arts organizations is exacerbated when they rely on a major seasonal event — like “The Nutcracker” — for large portions of revenue, said Amir Pasic, dean of the School of Philanthropy at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
One silver lining is the opportunity for organizations to improve their online offerings, which could also help open up markets to younger consumers, he said.
That’s the case in Toronto, where the National Ballet of Canada is contemplating future hybrid programming that offers tickets for in-person “Nutcracker” performances and less expensive tickets for those who want to watch it online. The company canceled its “Nutcracker” in August.
“We’re going to build into our model regular capture of content to build a more robust catalogue,” said Executive Director Barry Hughson. “So when we face this at some point in future — hopefully a long way away in the future — we will have solved that part of this equation.”
The cost of the digital equipment needed to record broadcast quality performances has been a sticking point for companies in the past, said Amy Fitterer, executive director of Dance/USA, a dance service and advocacy organization. Now, companies are working on ways to access such equipment to prepare for a hybrid future of performances, she said.
Other cancellations this year include performances by the New York City Ballet, the Charlotte Ballet, the Milwaukee Ballet, the Sacramento Ballet and the Kansas City Ballet, which is forgoing about $2.2 million in ticket sales.
Making it through this season is tough enough, but “if this goes beyond next year, then I think we’ve got some serious issues to attend to,” said Jeffrey Bentley, the Kansas City Ballet’s executive director.
Some companies that canceled are offering online streams of a past performance, such as Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet. Others are offering in-person performances of a sort, such as Atlanta Ballet’s “Drive-In Movie Experience” allowing patrons to watch a filmed past performance from their car.
Still others are proceeding, for now, with plans for live performances. The Eugene Ballet in Oregon canceled its normal four-state tour but expanded its stage offerings from four to 10 performances, with a socially distanced audience of 500 in a 2,500-seat auditorium. The company is shortening performances to 70 minutes, reducing the number of student participants and going without a live orchestra.
“We’re just all trying to be resilient, and our dancers are champing at the bit to get in the studio and start rehearsing things,” said Eugene Ballet Artistic Director Toni Pimble.
Of the 50 dance companies with the largest annual expenses surveyed by the Dance Data Project, only eight were proceeding with in-person performances. Others either canceled, planned to offer streaming versions or still haven’t made an announcement.
Read the full article here.
8 October 2020
DDP was delighted to host Stefanie Batten Bland this spring as a guest in our first round of Global Conversations interviews. Since we conducted our interview with SBB, the lockdown has ended, and the dance maker/artistic director has gone on to receive multiple virtual commissions from venues, initiatives, and companies eager to produce new works virtually. In a newsletter, Batten Bland wrote, “We continue into our Fall season in such gratitude to bring our work to you virtually – both celebrating the past and pressing onward through our new normal.”
Check out a couple of the trailers for the virtual works, new and old, at the links below and view SBB’s episode of Global Conversations: The Creative Process at the end of this post!
About Company SBB
Company SBB // Stefanie Batten Bland is an intercontinental dance-theatre company whose interdisciplinary creations for stages, spaces and films question contemporary and historical cultural symbolism – and the complexities of human relationships.
Learn more at https://www.companysbb.org/.
By Michaela Dwyer
Working at the intersection of dance theater and installation, Jerome Robbins award-winning choreographer/director Stefanie Batten Bland rebuilds the built environment: whether in the overlapping gestures of dinner guests, seated at a dinner table on a proscenium stage; wrapped and writhing within corded ropes along the parquet floors of a French parlor; or adjacent to the stone pillars of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, in moving memoriam of victims of police brutality.
As part of Duke Performances’ virtual fall season, Batten Bland’s intercontinental interdisciplinary vessel, Company SBB, explores a new work created for camera: a continuation of Batten Bland’s dance cinema practice, in alignment with the new daily choreographies of quarantine. Working from upstate New York, through river tributaries, Batten Bland marshals an intimate configuration of her company to underline historical and present-day directional up- and downstate tensions in the region during the pandemic. Those familiar with Batten Bland’s Duke Performances-commissioned work for the American Ballet Theatre Studio Company will see a thematic throughline in her ongoing investigation of monumentality: what’s upheld and what’s overturned in the material and geographical remaking of our relations.
Learn more and buy tickets here.
By Chris Jones
1 October 2020
The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago said Thursday that it has canceled its entire 2020-21 season at the Lyric Opera House.
The canceled programing includes the world premiere of Cathy Marston’s “Of Mice and Men” and the Joffrey premiere of George Balanchine’s “Serenade” (slated for Feb. 17-28, 2021), as well as the Chicago premiere of John Neumeier’s “The Little Mermaid” (April 21-May 2, 2021). Previously, Joffrey had canceled this fall’s production of Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” (Oct. 14-25) and the first staging at the Lyric of Christopher Wheeldon’s “The Nutcracker” (December 5-27), typically a huge source of revenue for the company and a highlight of the holiday season in Chicago, drawing tens of thousands to the Loop.
The Joffrey said that the decision, sparked by the COVID-19 crisis, will cost the non-profit institution in excess of $9 million at the box office. A philanthropic fund, dubbed the Joffrey Crisis Stabilization Fund, has been set up to address the disparity and cover basic operations costs through the fall of 2021. The ballet said the fund currently has raised about $7 million toward its $12 million goal. The company has not laid off its company of dancers, guaranteeing their existing contracts through next May.
Read the full article here.
By Claudia Bauer
28 September 2020
Sofiane Sylve had huge plans for 2020: Departing her post as a principal dancer at San Francisco Ballet, she embarked on a multifaceted, bicontinental career as ballet master and principal dancer at Dresden Semperoper Ballett, and artistic advisor and school director at Ballet San Antonio—and then COVID-19 hit, sidelining performances and administrative plans at both companies. But ballet dancers are nothing if not resilient. In her new leadership roles, Sylve is determined to help shepherd ballet through this challenging time—and transform it for the better. Pointe caught up with her by phone while she was in Dresden.
You started these amazing new positions, and then COVID happened. How have you had to adapt?
In Dresden, La Bayadère can’t happen because of the amount of people in the cast, and the costumes and wigs. BSA had to cancel October’s Don Quixote. We’re not sure Nutcracker is going to happen. I can’t have it on my conscience to have 25 dancers in a room, even if I do everything in San Antonio that Germany has been doing. In Germany, you have to wear a mask everywhere you go, and you can’t use the dressing rooms. They open the studios five minutes before you can go in, it’s only an hour class, they shuffle you out and clean for the entire hour. You need cleaning staff 24/7—no U.S. company has a budget for that.
How are you juggling these pivotal responsibilities at two companies—not to mention the travel?
I wanted my plate to be full, and it’s full, and I’m loving it. But with COVID, the travel is very difficult—I can get into Texas, but I could get stuck because of travel restrictions. I am on Zoom all day; I’ve hired BSA dancers and ballet masters on Zoom, and we do a lot of classes online. You see people in their homes, they see me running around with my dogs. In a way, it’s made us seem more human to each other.
Read the full article here.
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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