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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

Broadway World: San Francisco’s Ballet’s Free Weekly Streams Run Through The Month Of June

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22 May 2020

By BWW News Desk

San Francisco Ballet announces further free weekly streams on SF Ballet @ Home, featuring commissioned works from the 2018 Unbound festival and other notable ballets from SF Ballet’s repertory.

For each of the past eight weeks, SF Ballet has streamed a complete ballet from its archives on Facebook, IGTV, YouTube, and the SF Ballet website, calling on regional, national, and international audiences to relish the joy of dance while sheltering in place. SF Ballet @ Home is made possible through the generosity it has received from the community through the Critical Relief Fund. The recordings are produced under agreements with the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, American Guild of Musical Artists, American Federation of Musicians, and International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.

The Friday, June 12 stream will feature Arthur Pita‘s Björk Ballet. In conjunction, SF Ballet will host a virtual, free Nite Out celebration in honor of the 50th anniversary of San Francisco Pride. Nite Out is the Company’s long-running series of performances and post-show parties that celebrate diversity and the LGBTQ+ community through dance. Hosted by an SF Ballet dancer, the June 12 Nite Out celebration includes a Meet the Artist interview on Facebook, DIY cocktail recipes, and a DJ-curated set list.

Over 60% of SF Ballet’s ambitious repertory season was curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. To commemorate the artists and creativity of the Company, SF Ballet will stream the complete program from the 2020 Opening Night Gala, Spellbound, on June 26 on SF Ballet @ Home. The stream includes the world premiere performance of Val Caniparoli’s Foreshadow, inspired by the love triangle in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and the SF Ballet premiere of Danielle Rowe’s For Pixie. Other programming highlights include SF Ballet premiere of the pas de deux from David Dawson‘s Swan Lake, danced by departing principal dancers Sofiane Sylve and Carlo Di Lanno, and the world premiere of Myles Thatcher’s 05:49.

Read the full article here.

See Chicago Dance: What is the role of the arts critic in a pandemic?

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By Lauren Warnecke

6 May 2020

Each month, I preview upcoming dance events for See Chicago Dance, highlighting the productions that excite me the most. My job is to entice dance audiences to circle a date in their calendars, to make room for dance and to experience something they might otherwise not have tried.

Large venues closed in mid-March as the COVID-19 health crisis found its way to Chicago. By the end of that month, nearly everything was shut down. Many Chicagoans have more room than ever in their calendars. I write trips to the grocery store in my planner so I can feel as though I accomplished something that day. And artists necessarily pivoted, reacting to the crisis by venturing into digital forums to continue to make work.

This column is not a critic’s pick of online dance concerts, because I don’t intend to watch any.

Over the past several weeks, I talked to many dance leaders. While it’s clear that dance is struggling, it is the nature of dancers to make it work and present an air of optimism. I felt this acutely in private conversations and in an online convening gathering leaders from Chicago Dancemakers Forum, Links Hall, the Museum of Contemporary Art, High Concept Labs, the Harris Theater, Pivot Arts, and others to report on the state of their organizations. I heard nothing but certitude, even as they spoke about postponed productions, cuts in staff, vanishing grant money and cancelled galas.

Legacy organizations like the Joffrey Ballet, Giordano Dance Chicago, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Ensemble Espanol, each with more than 40 years of history, have weathered many storms. None quite like this. They may survive by remembering what it was like at the beginning, trimming the fat and whittling down to the core of their missions.

Then there are those who will view the crisis opportunistically. With dance universally leveled, here is a chance for smaller venues and independent artists to get ahead, since they will be able to open sooner. Here is a once in a century window of hibernation in which to reimagine the arts, and to fix that which has always ailed it: Could the pandemic serve as a springboard to abandon scarcity models once and for all? Can a diverse coalition rise to ensure a more equitable, sustainable future for the arts?

 

Read the article here.

Dance Magazine: Remembering Contact Improv Co-Creator Nancy Stark Smith, 1952-2020

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By Wendy Perron

5 May 2020

Co-creator of Contact Improvisation, improviser extraordinaire, and founder and co-editor of Contact Quarterly, Nancy Stark Smith passed away on May 1. A force as a dancer and an educator, she created a network of love for improvisation on a global scale. She died in her home in Florence, MA, of ovarian cancer. Messages from all over the world registered shock, sadness and poetic memories on social media.

She cracked open gender codes in dance with one casual comment. After watching Steve Paxton’s Magnesium (1972), a dance of hurling and falling for men, she told Paxton, “If you ever work like this with women, I’d love to know about it.”

She was a buoyant yet grounded improviser. Whether springing up out of the floor or boomeranging off another person, she made the pleasure of touch visible. She had a wondrous way of talking/writing about the sensations of momentum that drew people in.

On Facebook, her friend and early CI dancer, Christie Svane, wrote, “Our beloved Nancy Stark Smith left her wild and gentle dancing, unique, glorious, fearless body on Earth and made for home. Her collaborator and companion, Mike Vargas, pianist, composer and sound artist, was by her side at home in Florence, Mass. with her beloved flower garden beginning to bloom.

Read the full article here.

Dance Magazine: The Choreographer of “The Good Place” Just Launched an At-Home Dance Film Fest With Free Tutorials

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By Madeline Schrock

16 April 2020

Looking for a change from all that social-media scrolling while you’re social distancing? Check out the Shut In Dance Film Fest, a newly launched opportunity for dancers are home. Helmed by Nicole Berger, Andrew Pearson and Cain DeVore, the all-remote festival is doubling as free training grounds for artists who want to boost their dance-for-camera skills.

Here’s how it works: Select one of four prompts—like camouflaging yourself in your apartment or playing with your silhouette and profile—and create a short film using your smartphone. (The Shut In team recommends using FiLMiC Pro, a $14.99 app available for Apple and Android devices.)

Submissions will be evaluated by the creative directors who came up with the prompts: Los Angeles–based dance duo WHYTEBERG, choreographer and freelancer Madison Hicks, spoken word artist City James, and Mark Dendy and Stephen Donovan of dendy/donovan projects. They will choose footage from the submitted videos to each create a final dance film cut together by professional editors.

Read the full article from Dance Magazine here.

Dance Business Weekly: Smuin Ballet Finds a New Permanent Home

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By Rachel Caldwell

29 April 2020

Soon after taking the reins of San Francisco–based Smuin Contemporary Ballet in 2007, artistic director Celia Fushille realized that if the company was going to stay afloat, it would need its own building. With rental rates for commercial spaces in the Bay Area skyrocketing over the past decade, continuing to lease grew unsustainable for the 26-year-old nonprofit troupe. “We tried to lease, but couldn’t compete with tech companies,” says Fushille. “In 2009, I said to my board that we needed a permanent home for Smuin. I didn’t see how we were going to survive otherwise.”

Thanks to a $10 million capital campaign and a fortuitous collaboration with a dancer-turned-real-estate broker, that vision has now become a reality with the purchase of a 7,200-square-foot warehouse space in Potrero Hill, San Francisco.

After years of being nomads, Smuin could no longer justify the ballooning rental rates in the area. A typical commercial lease for an industrial or warehouse space in San Francisco runs about $60 to $72 per square foot compared to a national average of $26. Tack on the taxes, insurance and maintenance fees, and renting gets high pretty fast.

Read the full article here.

Dance Magazine: Female Choreographers Are Reimagining What Story Ballets Can Be

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By Jen Peters

27 April 2020

An iconic yet tortured female painter. A mistress wrapped up in a witch hunt in an early American colony. A talented cellist whose life ended prematurely after her battle with multiple sclerosis. These women are a far cry from classical ballet’s standard fare of supernatural fairies, sylphs and swans. But some female choreographers are starting to bring stories like theirs to major ballet stages.

Although narrative ballets have existed almost as long as the form itself, those framed through the female gaze have been historically rare. As contemporary choreographer Pam Tanowitz unapologetically commented in a 2016 New York Times article, “There is the famous quote from Balanchine: ‘Ballet is Woman.’ Well, it’s a woman made by a man.”

Today, there is a thrilling, 21st-century wave of story-driven ballets choreographed by women. What are their perspectives, and the stories they choose to tell, adding to ballet’s canon?

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Several women continued to push narrative ballets forward in the 20th century, including Bronislava Nijinska and Dame Ninette de Valois, and the boldly American choreographer Agnes de Mille. Through the rise of abstract ballets in the last 60 years, ballet companies filled choreographic gender gaps with iconic modern and contemporary works by Pina Bausch, Trisha Brown, Martha Graham, Twyla Tharp and, more recently, Aszure Barton, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jessica Lang, Crystal Pite and Pam Tanowitz.

But their contributions, by and large, were not story ballets, and it has only been in recent years that new narrative works have seen a resurgence in popularity—due in no small part to conventional box office wisdom that stories sell tickets.

This goes hand in hand with the push for the appearance of gender equity in commissions. In recent years, ballet companies have publicly committed to filling the need for female choreographers through incubator initiatives and programming. (Also not to be overlooked: More women are directing major companies than ever before.) While there are still fewer women than men commissioned to choreograph narrative ballets, the statistics are shifting as companies reevaluate the voices being offered opportunities.

Put together these two trends—the renewed popularity of narrative works and the need for companies to be seen commissioning more women—and you have the formula for female-choreographed story ballets.

Read the full article on Dance Magazine’s blog.

Laurent Liotardo/The English National Ballet

Latin Post: Watch Frida Kahlo Paintings Come To Life in This Online Ballet Production

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By Amy Santiago

23 April 2020

A Frida Kahlo-inspired production entitled “Broken Wings” premiered online Wednesday, April 22, according to a recent article.

Colombian-Belgian artist Annabelle Lopez Ochoa choreographed the production performed by the English National Ballet (ENB). She is also behind the choreography for Frida, a production for the Dutch National Ballet in 2002.

As the world confronts the challenges brought by the COVID-19 outbreak, theaters are forced to close, but some have brought their productions online. This marks the first time the full-length recordings of the company’s performances premiere online. Over the next month, you can watch their performances every Wednesday with a different production each time.

“[Frida] managed to transform her pain into art and portray herself with no frills. Her work is unapologetic and straightforward,” Lopez Ochoa said in an interview. “I find that very inspiring. I think that in general women are often second-guessing themselves or insecure about whether their work is good enough. Frida didn’t care so much about this. She used her work to fight for the Mexican identity while portraying herself, a woman that endured much suffering physically, emotionally, and psychologically.”

Read the full article in the Latin Post.

Hyperallergic: 95% of US Artists Have Lost Income Due to Pandemic, Survey Says

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By Valentina Di Liscia

24 April 2020

Artist Relief, the sweeping emergency aid initiative recently launched by seven arts funders, has completed its first funding cycle; with it, research partner Americans for the Arts has published the results of its accompanying COVID-19 Impact Survey, which measures the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on individual artists.

Since applications opened two weeks ago, more than 50,000 artists applied for 200 available unrestricted grants of $5,000 each. Of those applicants, over 11,000 also filled out Americans for the Arts’s survey, among them practicing, teaching, and hobby artists; creative workers; and culture bearers.

The findings paint a bleak picture of the cultural sector’s financial health: nearly two thirds of artists in the US are fully unemployed, and the majority see no clear path to recovery.

Read the full article on Hyperallergic.

Sarasota Magazine: Sarasota Ballet Announces 30th Anniversary Season

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By Kay Kipling

Local arts organizations continue to march on, planning new seasons even as current ones have been suspended or canceled. Latest case in point: the Sarasota Ballet, which has announced its coming 30th anniversary season to open in October and run through May 2021.

There have been disappointments for the company, as with others; a week of performances planned at Jacob’s Pillow in the Berkshires was eliminated when that dance center canceled its summer season, and fingers are still crossed that the Sarasota Ballet dancers will be able to take the stage at the Joyce Theater in New York as scheduled for August. But director Iain Webb is forging ahead with a season that includes three company premieres postponed from this spring, along with four others. And the 2020-21 season will close by featuring works by three of the greatest female choreographers of the 20th century.

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And for the closing program of the season—and the start of a multi-year project focused on female choreographers—the ballet presents a triple bill April 30-May 1 at the Sarasota Opera House. Opening the program will be the company premiere of Agnes de Mille’s Fall River Legend, retelling the story of the infamous Lizzie Borden in a character-focused piece created for American Ballet Theatre in 1948. Dame Ninette de Valois’ signature Checkmate returns to the Sarasota stage, and another company premiere—Les Biches by Bronislava Nijinska (sister of the better-known Vaslav Nijinsky, but a creator in her own right) with music by Poulenc will conclude the performances.

Read the full article from Sarasota Magazine.

Forbes: 2020 Drama Desk Awards: Complete List Of Nominees

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By Lee Seymour

Nominations for the 65th Drama Desk Awards were announced today, recognizing theater at every level of New York’s industry, from downtown hideyholes to the glitz of Broadway.

Even with the season cut short by the coronavirus, there were still over 200 eligible productions vying for recognition. Over three dozen shows received nods, everything from epic two-part plays to intimate chamber musicals to children’s puppet theater. The winners will be announced online on May 31st. (Full list below).

Leading the pack with 11 nominations, including Outstanding Musical, was Soft Power, which premiered downtown and had been eyeing a Rialto transfer next year.

Outstanding Choreography 

  • Camille A. Brown, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
  • Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, West Side Story
  • Keone Madrid and Mari Madrid, Beyond Babel
  • Kathleen Marshall, The Unsinkable Molly Brown
  • Sonya Tayeh, Moulin Rouge!
  • Travis Wall, The Wrong Man

The category of Outstanding Choreography includes 5 women – a first we’ve seen in award nominations that includes a majority of women choreographers.

Read the full article on Forbes.com.