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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

Cincinnati Business Courier: With Covid-19 protocols in place, Cincinnati Ballet returns joyously to the stage

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By Janelle Gelfand

24 September 2020

This weekend, Cincinnati Ballet will be one of the first dance companies in the nation to return to the stage since the Covid-19 lockdown. Three performances, the first in more than six months, sold out in an hour. An added fourth show sold out in five minutes.

It’s a cautious return – outdoors at Sawyer Point’s P&G Pavilion before a socially distanced audience and with myriad precautions for the dancers.

Each performance is free and will seat about 350 people, in circles from the same household.

Artistic director Victoria Morgan and two of her leading dancers – principal dancer Melissa Gelfin De-Poli and soloist David Morse – couldn’t contain their joy about returning to the studio and the stage.

“It’s a relief, it’s a joy, it just feels so right,” Morgan said. “Even though you sweat and you pant and you’re in a mask, I haven’t heard a single complaint. The dancers are really ready to take it on again. We’re desperate just to be there with our audiences and to feel that energy.”

For the past few weeks, Cincinnati Ballet dancers have been back in the studio, preparing for a fall season that most other companies have abandoned due to the coronavirus. Preparations have been complex, to say the least. They are rehearsing an art form with a large amount of personal contact. For that reason, the “Ballet in the Park” program will consist mainly of solos and pas de deux.

It is a mixture of new works and company favorites such as excerpts from “The Wizard of Oz,” “Don Quixote” and Morgan’s own “Black Coffee,” which Morgan choreographed to the music of k.d. lang.

Read the full article here.

 

The Philadelphia Inquirer: Philly’s 2020 fall dance season has abandoned all the rules – here’s what to expect

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By Nancy G. Heller

26 September 2020

Lucky for the rest of us, artists are unstoppable. In the face of seemingly insurmountable COVID-19-related restrictions, dancers have been working with filmmakers for the past six months to find exciting new ways to continue creating and sharing their creations. Thus, we can look forward to a surprisingly robust fall 2020 dance season, even as we are looking from home.

Two extraordinary, and very different, highlights of this season are available right now, online: The Philadelphia Matter, 1972/2020 by New York-based modern dance pioneer David Gordon (through Oct. 4, details at fringearts.com) and the first installment of BalletX Beyond (ongoing at balletx.org), an all-digital subscription series from the local contemporary ballet troupe.

In Gordon’s hour-long film, he collaborates with his longtime professional and life partner, British dancer Valda Setterfield, plus videographer Jorge Cousineau, to create a rich visual and aural collage, with images assembled into an ever-changing patchwork of various-sized rectangles that cover the screen — like a Zoom meeting gone berserk.

It centers on three of his signature pieces: Song and Dance (inspired by Gordon’s childhood love of Hollywood musicals), Up Close (an intimate, loving, and ultimately devastating duet made for him and his wife), and Chair (which evolved from the carefully calibrated exercises Gordon invented to help his wife recover from a terrible injury).

But the film also invites viewers to deeply explore some of the most basic questions related to dance on film: What are the differences between the filmed performance of a dance that was originally conceived for live theater and dance that was always intended to form part of a film? How about dance “numbers” in movie musicals?

Read the full article here.

DDP’s new 2020-2021 Season Status Updates resource featured in The Dance Edit

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25 September 2020

The Dance Data Project has compiled an index of ballet companies’ 2020–21 season status updates, with information on cancellations and virtual programming. (dancedataproject.com)

Sign up for The Dance Edit newsletter here.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Atlanta Ballet’s drive-in Nutcracker: an alternative holiday tradition

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By Bo Emerson

24 September 2020

Everything has changed this year and the holidays will change as well.

Door-to-door for Halloween? The CDC recommends against it. Getting the whole crowd together for Thanksgiving? That could be tricky.

And what of “The Nutcracker,” the wintertime staple that pays the rest of the year’s bills for the Atlanta Ballet?

Just assembling the dancers on stage and the orchestra in the pit would pose some challenges, say ballet officials. Plus, the new home of “The Nutcracker,” the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre, has postponed all events until the new year.

But the Atlanta Ballet refuses to be stopped, and on Dec. 2-6 will go outside the footlights.

For five nights the ballet company will construct a pop-up drive-in movie theater on the Cobb Energy Centre’s surface parking lot, and will welcome patrons at $100 a carload ($150 for the front-row parking spaces).

On the screen will be a video version of Tchaikovsky’s marvelous music and Yuri Possokhov’s choreography, telling the story of an enchanted tree, a dreamlike journey and a climactic battle. The film will feature the new staging of “The Nutcracker,” with its outsize sets and startling video projections, introduced to Atlanta audiences in 2018 by artistic director Gennadi Nedvigin.

Read the full article here.

The Guardian: Royal Ballet announces October comeback with more than 70 dancers

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By Mark Brown

23 September 2020

One of the largest dance performances to happen anywhere in the world since the coronavirus pandemic began has been announced featuring the full company of the Royal Ballet – and while it will be socially distanced, there will be dance duets thanks to couples in bubbles.

The company has revealed ambitious details of its “comeback” after a seven-month break from full performances on the Covent Garden stage. The plan is for a celebration performance with more than 70 dancers and a full orchestra on 9 October, livestreamed around the world.

Pieces have been chosen that accommodate distanced dancing but it would not have been the same without the intimacy of duets, or pas de deux, according to the Royal Ballet’s director Kevin O’Hare.

The company already has three real-life couples in the shape of Mayara Magri and Matthew Ball, Francesca Hayward and Cesar Corrales, and Fumi Kaneko and Reece Clarke. It has created seven more bubbles to allow close contact including the superstar pairing of Marianela Nuñez and Vadim Muntagirov. Other pairs include Sarah Lamb and Ryoichi Hirano; Yasmine Naghdi and Nicol Edmonds; and Akane Takada and Federico Bonelli.

“Emotionally, it feels extraordinary to be returning,” O’Hare told the Guardian. “We have to be on stage. It is all about performing on stage as a company, there is nothing greater to us than that … to be there as one. People are feeling quite emotional about it and are desperate for it to happen.”

Read the full article here.

Washington Post: Ford Foundation fund to award an unprecedented $160 million to minority arts groups

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By Geoff Edgers

24 September 2020

Eduardo Vilaro, the artistic director and chief executive of New York’s Ballet Hispánico, has tried to ignore the slights. Well-heeled patrons who wouldn’t join his board because they favored older, Whiter organizations. Theater managers telling him they couldn’t present the company because they had already programmed a “minority-themed” group.

And like so many self-described institutions of color, Ballet Hispánico has a tiny endowment, about $1 million. New York City Ballet, just a cab ride away in Manhattan, has $220 million in the bank, according to its most recent audit. With so little saved up, Ballet Hispánico’s ambitions are perpetually limited.

But next year will be different. The Ford Foundation this week is announcing an unprecedented $160 million-and-growing initiative called America’s Cultural Treasures, with substantial grants going to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) organizations across the country. The grants are, in most cases, the largest ever for the 20 recipients in the first round. Ballet Hispánico will receive $4 million, more than half of its $7 million annual budget.

“It takes an ice pick to this huge glacier of structural white supremacy,” Vilaro says. “This is reorganizing and saying, ‘We have other national treasures that we need to refocus on.’ ”

This is the Ford Foundation’s latest and most dramatic salvo in President Darren Walker’s bid to reinvent how Americans — and most important, American philanthropists — value theater companies, museums and the arts overall. The gap between rich, largely White institutions and younger, BIPOC organizations is wide, but Walker says he sees an opportunity for change now. The killing of George Floyd brought attention to the systemic racism in American society. The pandemic shutdowns drew attention to the financial gulf in the arts world.

“Just as inequality is playing out in our society, in the arts it is playing out,” Walker says. “The Getty and the National Gallery of Art are in their own bubbles. Yes, they’re concerned about finances, but as one of them said to me, ‘This is terrible, but we can raise the money.’

“When you get to the medium and smaller arts organizations — that don’t have endowments, that don’t have rich boards, that don’t have huge amounts of operating cash flow — those organizations are panicked. If we don’t help them, they will be gone.”

Even such blue-chip institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Boston Symphony Orchestra have made painful cuts in recent months, but Walker and other philanthropy leaders have feared that many organizations run by and serving people of color might have to shutter for good.

In June, the 84-year-old Ford Foundation, which has increasingly focused on fighting economic and racial disparity since Walker took over in 2013, announced that it would borrow $1 billion by issuing bonds to help nonprofit groups in every area it funds. And behind the scenes, Walker was working on something focused entirely on culture: A plan to distribute $85 million of that total to organizations run by and in communities of color for what would become America’s Cultural Treasures.

He would not do it alone. Walker began to recruit other foundations to join the mission. Kate Levin, who oversees the arts program at Bloomberg Philanthropies, particularly appreciated the reshuffling invoked by the initiative’s name. Bloomberg is giving $10 million.

“Calling them ‘America’s Cultural Treasures’ recognizes that they are excellent but have suffered the impact of systemic racism by being undercapitalized,” Levin says. “This is a situation that’s been in place a long time now, but it’s time to take action.”

The Ford plan is meant as more than a one-time coronavirus bailout. The network of foundations and donors is providing money that will go to the recipients over four years, presumably long after theaters and museums reopen. And the excitement over a establishing this new set of “treasures” has been contagious.

As of this week, Ford’s initial $85 million commitment spawned $80 million more in giving, which includes Bloomberg, the MacArthur Foundation ($5 million), the Abrams Foundation ($5 million) and the Alice L. Walton Foundation ($5 million).

The first 20 grant recipients, picked by Ford in consultation with the national donors, are geographically and racially diverse. They include the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Mich.; the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage; the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Apollo Theater in New York; the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico in San Juan; and the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Seattle. The $1 million to $6 million grants are unrestricted, so the recipients can use them on whatever they choose.

Read the entire article here.

New York Times: The Metropolitan Opera Won’t Reopen for Another Year

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By Michael Cooper

23 September 2020

The Metropolitan Opera announced Wednesday that the still-untamed coronavirus pandemic has forced it to cancel its entire 2020-21 season, prolonging one of the gravest crises it has faced in its 137-year history and keeping it dark until next September.

The decision is likely to send ripples of concern through New York and the rest of the country, as Broadway theaters, symphony halls, rock venues, comedy clubs, dance spaces and other live arts institutions grapple with the question of when it will be safe again to perform indoors. Far from being a gilded outlier, the Met, the nation’s largest performing arts organization, may well prove to be a bellwether.

The outbreak has kept the 3,800-seat opera house closed since mid-March, sapping it of more than $150 million in revenue and leaving roughly 1,000 full-time employees, including its world-class orchestra and chorus, furloughed without pay since April. Now, with the virus still too much of a threat to allow for a reopening on New Year’s Eve, as hoped, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, is making plans to adapt to a world transformed by the pandemic, including by trying to curb the company’s high labor costs.

“The future of the Met relies upon it being artistically as powerful as ever, if not more so,” Mr. Gelb said in an interview. “The artistic experiences have to be better than ever before to attract audiences back. Where we need to cut back is costs.”

As he canceled the current season, Mr. Gelb announced an ambitious lineup for 2021-22 to reassure donors and ticket buyers that the Met has robust plans. An even more difficult effort will play out offstage: Mr. Gelb said he would ask the company’s powerful unions to agree to cost-cutting concessions that he said would be necessary in the post-pandemic world, and which a number of other prominent performing arts organizations have begun to implement.

The Met plans to return to its stage next September with Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first time it will mount an opera by a Black composer — a long-overdue milestone, and part of a new focus on contemporary works alongside the ornate productions of canonical pieces for which the company is famous. The Met will also experiment with earlier curtain times, shortening some operas and offering more family fare as it tries to lure back audiences.

Read the full NYT article here.

Broadway World: ABT to Present World Premieres by Gemma Bond, Darrell Grand Moultrie, Christopher Rudd and Pam Tanowitz

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By BWW News Desk

22 September 2020

World Premieres by Gemma Bond, Darrell Grand Moultrie, Christopher Rudd and Pam Tanowitz are planned for digital release in Autumn 2020, it was announced today by Artistic Director Kevin Mckenzie.

These new commissions will be created in quarantined settings and filmed to premiere at ABT’s 80th Anniversary Fall 2020 Gala, Wednesday, November 18, on American Ballet Theatre’s YouTube Channel and www.abt.org.

To create these works for digital distribution, ABT dancers and choreographers have embarked on four and five-week residencies in ballet bubbles at two locations in New York State. Each creation period adheres to strict medical and safety guidelines with a quarantine and testing period prior to the start of rehearsals. Behind-the-scenes footage, along with interviews with dancers and creators, will be captured for viewing on ABT’s social media platforms. Two individual ballet bubbles began September 21, 2020 at the Silver Bay YMCA Conference and Family Retreat Center in Silver Bay, New York and at P.S. 21 in Chatham, New York.

In Silver Bay, New York, choreographer and former ABT dancer Gemma Bond will create a new work set to John Harbison’s Variations for Clarinet, Violin and Piano for ABT dancers Breanne Granlund, Hee Seo, Katherine Williams, Carlos Gonzalez and newly promoted Principal Dancer Thomas Forster. Bond’s new work is her second for ABT, following A Time There Was (2019).

Also at Silver Bay, choreographer Christopher Rudd will create with recently promoted ABT Principal Dancer Calvin Royal III and corps de ballet member João Menegussi. Rudd’s new work, Touché, a male duet, is set to Que Te Mate Desierto, from the original motion picture score by Woodkid,and Giuseppe Tornatore Suite from the motion picture Malèna by Ennio Morricone and recorded by Yo-Yo Ma. Commissioned in early 2020 and delayed due to the pandemic, Touché is Rudd’s first work for American Ballet Theatre.

Simultaneously in Chatham, New York, six dancers will quarantine, train and create with choreographer Darrell Grand Moultrie. Moultrie’s new work, his first for American Ballet Theatre, is a celebration of American jazz created to a score by Duke Ellington. The cast for Moultrie’s new work includes Anabel Katsnelson, Betsy McBride, Erica Lall, Jacob Clerico, Melvin Lawovi and Duncan McIlwaine.

Read the full article here.

Dance Magazine: Why Do Mixed-Rep Companies Still Rely on Ballet for Company Class?

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By Zachary Whittenburg

21 September 2020

In a single performance by a mixed-rep company, you might see its shape-shifting dancers performing barefoot, in sneakers and in heels. While such a group may have “ballet” in its name and even a rack of tutus in storage, its current relationship to the art form can be tenuous at best. That disconnect grows wider every year as contemporary choreographers look beyond ballet—if not beyond white Western forms entirely—in search of new inspiration and foundational techniques.

Yet dancers at almost all of the world’s leading mixed-rep ensembles take ballet classes before rehearsals and shows. Most companies rarely depart from ballet more than twice a week and some never offer alternative classes.

“The question, ‘Why do you take ballet class to prepare you for repertory which is not strictly classical?’ has been in the air since Diaghilev’s time,” says Peter Lewton-Brain, Monaco-based president of the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science. “What you’re doing onstage is often not what you’re doing in class.”

Thanks to campaigns for greater cultural and racial equity in the arts, many inspired or strengthened by Black Lives Matter, there’s more self-awareness today among those who might’ve once proudly declared that ballet is “the foundation of all dance.”

That’s a fallacy, but it rests on assumptions that remain in circulation, says Los Angeles–based Jermaine Spivey, staging artist for Crystal Pite and a regular performer with Kidd Pivot. “It’s centered around a white person’s idea of the world—a white person’s idea of abstract, a white person’s idea of conceptualism or expressionism, and then everything else is ‘included.’ We’re ‘diversifying,’ but we’re still based on the same principles as before. Everyone has to get comfortable with decentralizing whiteness and then ballet will fall where it needs to fall.”

Read the full Dance Magazine article here.

Dance Magazine: Meet the 2020 Dance Magazine Award Honorees

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By Jennifer Stahl

21 September 2020

Since 1954, Dance Magazine has celebrated the living legends among us with the Dance Magazine Awards. This year, in light of deep reflections on racial equity inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, the selection committee decided to take a close look at exactly who the magazine has honored over the past seven decades. Unsurprisingly, the list is overwhelmingly white. Although it’s grown more diverse in recent years, many brilliant artists of color have been left out for far too long.

So for 2020, in order to reckon with and take a step toward repairing that history, the committee chose an outstanding group of all-Black artists. I’m delighted to announce our incredible honorees for 2020:

 

Carlos Acosta

In addition to dancing with some of the world’s most prestigious companies, including The Royal Ballet, American Ballet Theatre and Houston Ballet, Carlos Acosta has choreographed productions of Don Quixote and Carmen, plus Guys and Dolls for the West End. Acosta established his own dance company, Acosta Danza, in 2016 in his native Cuba, and opened a dance academy there through the Carlos Acosta International Dance Foundation a year later. He also became artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet in January 2020, and currently leads both organizations on either side of the Atlantic.

Debbie Allen

An internationally recognized director, choreographer, teacher, dancer and actor, Debbie Allen first made her mark on Broadway in revivals like West Side Story, for which she was nominated for a Tony. She became a household name with the movie-turned-television-classic “Fame,” and has since directed and produced several TV series including “A Different World,” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “Scandal.” Allen has been artist in residence at the Kennedy Center for over 15 years. She founded the Debbie Allen Dance Academy in Los Angeles, mentoring and inspiring hundreds of students. She is currently an executive producer, director and actress on ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Camille A. Brown

Camille A. Brown‘s prolific choreography merges her modern dance foundation with elements of African, social dance and musical theater to highlight deeply personal and complex Black experiences. In addition to being artistic director of Camille A. Brown & Dancers, she has been commissioned by companies like Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Urban Bush Women, Complexions Contemporary Ballet and Ballet Memphis. Her Broadway choreography credits include Choir Boy (for which she was nominated for a Tony) and Once On This Island. She also choreographed Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert on NBC, as well as The Metropolitan Opera’s Porgy and Bess. Netflix’s soon-to-be-released Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, directed by George C. Wolfe, will mark her feature film debut.

See the full list of honorees here.