DDP Talks To
"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
8 September 2020
Stick Figure Entertainment, in association with AMERICAN MASTERS Pictures, is proud to announce Twyla Moves (w.t.), a feature documentary on legendary dancer, director and choreographer Twyla Tharp. The film will have its exclusive U.S. broadcast premiere as part of the AMERICAN MASTERS series on PBS, and will feature never-before seen interviews and select performances from Tharp’s vast array of more than 160 choreographed works, including 129 dances, 12 television specials, six major Hollywood movies, four full-length ballets, four Broadway shows and two FIGURE SKATING routines.
Twyla Moves (w.t.) will provide a first-hand glimpse into the legendary choreographer’s storied career and famously rigorous creative process. A pioneer of both modern dance and ballet, Tharp will share intimate details behind her trailblazing dances (“Fugue,” “Push Comes to Shove,” “Baker’s Dozen”), her cinematic partnership with Miloš Forman (Hair, Amadeus, Ragtime) and her wildly successful Broadway career alongside such luminaries as Billy Joel, Frank Sinatra and David Byrne. Tracing her influential career, the film follows Tharp as she builds a high-profile work from the ground up with an international cast of stars (Misty Copeland, Herman Cornejo, Maria Khoreva) who rehearse by video conference during the coronavirus pandemic.
Read the full article here.
8 September 2020
Virtual Pathways Dance Festival 2020 (VPDF) is a virtual dance festival featuring cutting-edge archived dances, including works by Doug Varone & Dancers, Helen Pickett, Yu Dance Theatre, and Complexions Contemporary Ballet. VPDF 2020 is produced by Alyssandra Katherine Dance (AKD), Co-Presented by ODC Theater online.
The roster features works spanning genres, highlighting the breadth and diversity of dance styles in a new digital format. AKD’s mission is to bring visibility to dance companies nationally, giving chosen companies an opportunity to showcase work to new audiences and widen their reach at no cost. We seek to use this festival as a platform to provide financial support to contributing artists and support innovative works through ticket sales. There will be 4 evenings, each with a theme: Identity, Healing, Home/Sanctuary, and Time/Scope.
Virtual Pathways Dance Festival is produced by 3 formidable female choreographers Marika Brussel, Carly Lave, and Alyssandra Wu. Brussel is a ballet choreographer who reshapes contemporary narratives, bringing ballet into the 21st Century. Lave is a contemporary choreographer whose work seeks to question the self through visceral immersive performance. Wu is a freelance choreographer whose work explores issues dealing with East Asian identity and mental illness.
Read the full article here.
By Lauren Warnecke
9 September 2020
In her teens, Lauren Flower realized she was different. Originally from Fresno, California, Flowers moved to Arizona and trained with Tucson Regional Ballet and the school at Ballet Arts Tucson before accepting a scholarship with Houston Ballet II. It was in Houston that Flower started to think she might be gay, but didn’t feel she had anyone to talk to about it.
“I quickly shot all those feelings down,” says Flower. “I was petrified. I thought no one would get it or understand what I was realizing about myself.” When she returned to her home state to join Ballet Arizona in 2013, Flower remained closeted in her professional life. But she began to meet other queer women outside of ballet who helped her to embrace her identity. At age 22, Flower came out and joined Boston Ballet shortly afterward, committed to being fully out of the closet in her life there.
Flower says getting involved in the LGBTQ community made the absence of queer women in ballet more apparent to her. While there are plenty of examples of queer people in the dance world, Flower says ballet in particular is lacking role models for gay women. (Katy Pyle’s company, Ballez, is a notable exception.)
Traditional ballet companies do not typically shy away from celebrating the gay community, but for women there is a profound gap in representation. Earlier this year, a friend pointed out to Flower that Boston Ballet was featuring its gay male dancers in a series of Instagram posts celebrating Pride Month. No one approached Flower, one of two openly gay women in the company, about contributing to the social media campaign. It was only after bringing it up to the PR team that she was included.
Read the full article here.
By Alex Marshall
28 May 2020
Eight dancers from the Ballet du Rhin were partway through a class at their studio in Mulhouse, eastern France, recently, when the company’s artistic director decided to step things up.
The dancers had been doing gentle exercises at the barre. Then, the director, Bruno Bouché, asked them to perform a short routine, heavy on pirouettes, in socially distanced pairs.
Alice Pernão, 22, one of the first dancers to try, performed the spins with the relish of a dancer moving her limbs fully for the first time in months.
But as soon as she finished, Ms. Pernão performed a little extra routine that dancers worldwide might soon have to get used to: She flipped her face mask off an ear, and, breathing heavily, rushed back to her place at the barre to gulp down some water.
She then disinfected her hands with gel, put the mask back on, and tried to catch her breath for the next exercise.
Read the full New York Times article here.
By Alex Marshall
19 August 2020
For the past three weeks, the Mariinsky Ballet, one of Russia’s most renowned companies, led the dance world in showing how ballet could return to the stage.
It hosted galas at its St. Petersburg theaters, featuring solos and duets performed by dancers who had undergone weekly tests for coronavirus.
More ambitiously, it had begun staging full-length ballets, with a run of the Romantic classic “La Sylphide.” Audience members were provided with masks and gloves, and seating was distanced, with an empty space between each viewer.
Then, on Aug. 13, the performances stopped. In a development that will concern other dance companies hoping to return to the stage, the Mariinsky Ballet has suspended all performances, classes and rehearsals, a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. (The Mariinsky’s opera and orchestral programs continue uninterrupted, the statement added.)
She did not answer questions about the reason for that suspension. But on Monday, Interfax, the Russian news service, reported that about 30 people in the company had contracted the coronavirus. Xander Parish, a British dancer who is a principal soloist with the Mariinsky, confirmed in a telephone interview that there had been an outbreak.
“They’ve tried really hard to be safe,” he said. “It’s not like our rehearsals have been badly organized or anything.”
Read the full New York Times article.
By Sara Baukneckt
31 August 2020
Susan Jaffe remembers her reaction when she learned she would be Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s next artistic director.
“I was pacing back and forth. I could feel the tears coming down my face. I was hyperventilating, really,” she recalls. “Then I sat down and said, ‘Wait a minute. I can’t come. We’re in the middle of a pandemic.’”
She took the job anyway, reassured by PBT’s board that the company is financially sound and could weather the COVID-19 storm. Nearly two months in, she’s determined to help make sure that happens.
PBT announced last week that, due to pandemic restrictions and theater closures, it will hold open-air performances in lieu of indoor shows, beginning with shows next month outside its headquarters in the Strip District. For now, the 2021 portion of its schedule will remain as is.
The “Open Air Series” will run Sept. 10-14 and include appearances by Pittsburgh CLO, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Pittsburgh Opera, Jevon Rushton Group and special guests presented by the August Wilson African American Cultural Center.
PBT’s mainstage season had been set to open in late October with “Balanchine + Tchaikovsky” at Benedum Center. That will become a socially distanced outdoor experience in a new “mobile performing arts venue” outside PBT’s building. “The Nutcracker” is also being reimagined beyond a traditional theater setting.
Executive Director Harris Ferris says Ms. Jaffe is the right choice for artistic director “especially because of the adaptability that’s required with COVID-19 and the programming innovations that are needed. If we can’t get on the stages, we’ve got to figure out another way.”
Doing so comes with many questions, Ms. Jaffe says. How do you get students back in class safely? What about company dancers? Should only those who cohabitate be in a studio at the same time? Dressing rooms, or no dressing rooms?
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Paying it forward
When Ms. Jaffe’s time on stage ended, her career as an educator, choreographer and administrator began.
“I really felt like it was my responsibility to give back,” she says. “Now I’m in service to ballet and to dance and to nurturing and bringing forth the next generation.”
In 2003-10, she taught in the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School of American Ballet Theatre and co-founded, owned and directed a dance studio. For two years, she worked as ballet mistress for ABT. She also created works for the company and other arts organizations across the country.
In 2012, Ms. Jaffe became dean of dance at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. She’s also a board member for the Youth America Grand Prix and Dance Magazine Awards.
She was working in North Carolina when she was approached by a search firm about the PBT position.
“I had built a very strong program and was very happy there,” she says. “But then I reminded myself that to be an artistic director was a lifelong dream for me, or at least through my adulthood.”
Her final interview was in March, shortly before COVID-19 shutdowns took effect. Concerned about getting on a plane during a pandemic, she drove to Pittsburgh from North Carolina for a two-day visit. Her personality, background and vision were deemed a match and she was unanimously approved by the board.
“She’s extremely approachable and amicable,” Mr. Ferris says. “She’s got the emotional stability that can steady the ship and keep everyone positively focused.”
Beyond navigating COVID-19, Ms. Jaffe has big ideas for PBT and its growing school. She wants more diversity in choreography, more collaborations with museums and other institutions and someday, perhaps a choreographic festival in Pittsburgh. In regards to the PBT School, additional satellite locations are being considered as a way to bring ballet into more communities.
Read the full article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
By Marina Harss
25 August 2020
Something many films of dance fail to convey is the rush produced by the happy marriage of music and movement. A recent movie by two dancers from Dance Theater of Harlem — Derek Brockington and Alexandra Hutchinson — is an exception.
“Dancing Through Harlem,” created for the yearly Harlem Week festival and the African-American Day Parade, is both a tribute to the neighborhood in which it was filmed and a celebration of pure dance. In the early mornings over three days Mr. Brockington and Ms. Hutchinson filmed themselves and six colleagues performing excerpts from “New Bach,” by the company’s resident choreographer, Robert Garland.
Mr. Garland deftly combines the crisp rhythms of Bach with sharp footwork, jazzy syncopations, and hints of West African dance and the Harlem Shake. The dancers in turn take the choreography out into the streets: to a subway platform at St. Nicholas Avenue, a courtyard among the neo-Gothic buildings of the City College of New York, and out in front of the colorful murals around the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building. Dance has never looked more alive.
Read the full article here.
By Sanjoy Roy
21 August 2020
Some dances seem timeless; Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s Shelter seems perennially timely. Created in 1988 in response to homelessness on the streets of New York, the piece was taken into the repertory of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 1992. Zollar adapted it for her company performances in New Orleans, post-Katrina, and the Ailey company revived it again in 2017. Now showing in the online Ailey All Access season, it has become newly urgent during the coronavirus crisis.
Just 20 minutes long, it draws its power not from where it starts, but what it points to. Performed by six women (the company also perform an all-male version), it’s a ragged, scrabbling work, driven by Junior Wedderburn’s stuttering percussion and layered with spoken and sung texts that – like the bodies on stage – bring their own irregular rhythms. The opening scene, narrating the all-too-easy fall into homelessness, ends with a pivotal line: “It can happen to you, too.”
Read the full review online here.
By Lyndsey Winship
17 August 2020
The squeak of a jogger’s trainers and the ting of a bicycle bell are not the usual soundtrack to ballet, but then a stretch of the Regent’s Canal in Hackney is not where you’d expect to see dancers from the Royal Ballet perform.
On a warm Saturday afternoon, the threat of rain in the air, bare-torsoed Harry Churches swoops across a pontoon jutting out over the canal, the audience on the opposite side of the water. Partner Annette Buvoli enters the stage and their bodies etch out classical lines and when the dance ends with an embrace, a swooning sigh comes from a group of young women watching through the railings, canned cocktails in hand.
This free, Instagram-advertised event is DistDancing, one of the few opportunities to see live dance at the moment and its founder Chisato Katsura is a member of the Royal Ballet. Katsura, 23, moved to a new flat during lockdown and her landlord, Russell Gray, also owns Hoxton Docks, a former coal store turned performance venue. When he found out she was a dancer, Gray asked if she could come up with a performance for the canalside. Katsura and Royal Ballet colleague Valentino Zucchetti put together a programme of performers across various dance and circus styles, including Royal Ballet principal Matthew Ball and partner Mayara Magri, and contemporary dancer Maëva Berthelot, formerly of Hofesh Shechter Company.
Read the entire article here.
By Gary Craig
21 August 2020
Once a teenager at the renowned School of American Ballet, Aesha Ash knows how moving and significant it would have been to have a teacher who looked like herself.
Now she will be that teacher.
“For Black women and people of color, to feel they belong in these institutions we have to see ourselves,” Ash said this week.
Ash, a 42-year-old Rochester native, has long been a trailblazer, knocking down racial walls in the largely white world of professional ballet.
She once was the sole Black female ballerina with the New York City Ballet, and, now, she has been chosen as the first Black female full-time instructor at the School of American Ballet, or SAB, in New York City. Teenagers and younger dancers study and train at SAB, an associate school of the New York City Ballet.
In a recent article, The New York Times highlighted Ash’s appointment with a headline that in part stated: “This former City Ballet dancer becomes the first Black female member of the School of American Ballet’s permanent faculty. Yes, it’s a big deal.”
Such a big deal that Ash, her husband, and their two young children — a 10-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son — decided to move from the California neighborhood they love to Manhattan for her to take on the faculty job.
“The reason why we made the decision is because this position goes so much bigger than just a ballet teacher at a prestigious school,” Ash said in a telephone interview this week from her new Manhattan home. “The historic meaning of this position was just something we could not look away from. It was my husband who was telling me, ‘Aesha, this is something you stand for. This has been your work from the very beginning.’ ”
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