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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

Washington Post: Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave her life to the country- and her heart to the performing arts

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By Peter Marks

19 September 2020

On a frigid night in January 2003, I darted out of Signature Theatre in Arlington after a performance of the musical “110 in the Shade.” I’m often the first person out of the theater — a critic’s habit — but on this night, I spotted an older man rushing ahead of me toward a limo and a petite woman on the periphery of my vision, carefully negotiating an icy patch.

“Ruth,” the man called out, “move your ass!”

As it sunk in that this was the esteemed associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and her husband, Marty, I felt that special twinge of Washington privilege: to have witnessed a funny, unguarded moment in the life of a revered public servant. She became a real person to me in that instant, just someone who, like me, loved the theater and was now trying to beat the post-show crush, though not at quite the pace her companion was setting.

On countless nights to follow over the years, I would see Justice Ginsburg in the theaters of Washington, on the occasions critics were invited to Arena Stage and Signature Theatre and Shakespeare Theatre Company. She was the most faithful patron of the performing arts in the upper echelons of officialdom I have ever known. Often, she was seated in front of me or just across the aisle, and I had to resist the temptation to watch her instead of the production. Or to lean over and whisper: How do you have time to sit on the Supreme Court all day and schlep in the evening to see “West Side Story?”

The answer was obvious. She couldn’t stay away. That’s what passion for the arts does to a person.

Read the full article here.

 

 

All Arts: Watch: Misty Copeland Talks Books and Why She Champions Ballet

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By Isabella Boylston

17 September 2020

When I came up with my wish list of artists to interview for Ballerina Book Club, Misty was at the top. She’s changed the game and inspired me and so many. In addition to all of her accomplishments in the ballet world, she’s a best-selling author.

One of the things I missed most about this Met season was getting to share a dressing room with my sisters, Misty and Stella Abrera. Those times we spend together backstage create a unique bond that I treasure so deeply. Speaking of the Met season, Misty was slated for a historic performance of “Romeo and Juliet” opposite the stunning danseur noble Calvin Royal III, who’s this month’s “Friend Picks” interview.

Luckily, I was able to catch up with Misty over Zoom for this interview in May. I really enjoyed hearing Misty’s take on how writing and dancing are parallel creative process. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did!

Don’t miss her new children’s book “Bunheads,” available Sept. 29.

Watch the full interview in the video above. A modified transcript is below.

The following interview transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Hi, Misty. Welcome to “Ballerina Book Club.” We’re so happy that you’re here.

Thank you. I’m so, so excited. I’ve never done anything like this with my friends and colleagues.

I know. Okay, so, first thing: We should talk about when we first met.

Okay. Oh, my gosh. Do you remember this story?

I don’t think so. I mean, all I know is when I first came to ABT, obviously, I knew who you were. I had the Pointe Magazine with you on the cover. And I was just intimidated, frankly, because you were just this impressive figure and beautiful dancer and everything.

You’re crazy. No, I just remember you were new to the studio company, just starting with the new group. And we were at a party. I can’t remember whose house we were at. And you came up to me — maybe it was some type of donor thing, but I just remember it was a house and party situation — and you introduced yourself as Hildur. And then you were like, “Wait. I mean, Isabella. I mean, wait.” And I was like, “Huh?” And it was so adorable. And that was my first impression of you.

Read the full interview here.

ABC4: Legendary Hispanic Ballerina announced as new Director at Ballet West Academy

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By Tracy Smith

18 September 2020

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (ABC4 News) – World-renowned and legendary ballerina Evelyn Cisneros-Legate has been announced as the new Director of all four campuses of Utah’s Frederic Quinney Lawson Ballet West Academy.

Originally from Huntington Beach, California, Evelyn trained at the San Francisco Ballet School, and the School of American Ballet. She joined the San Francisco Ballet when it was under the direction of Lew Christensen, brother of Ballet West’s Found, William Christensen.

According to a press release sent to ABC4 News, “when she was performing she became the San Franciso Ballet’s “prima-ballerina” and then became an international star under Christensen, Michael Smuin, and Helgi Tómasson.”

While at San Francisco Ballet, Cisneros-Legate was the first Mexican American to be elevated to a Principal Dancer in the United States. She was named “100 Influentials” by Hispanic Business and the Huffington Post called her one of the “17 ballet icons who are changing the face of dance today.” Cisneros-Legate has been featured on the covers of Dance Magazine, Ballet News, and Hispanic Magazine.

Read the full article here.

Broadway World: American Ballet Theatre Presents MOVING STORIES: An ABT Film Festival

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By BWW News Desk

18 September 2020

Celebrating the creativity of ABT dancers, American Ballet Theatre presents Moving Stories: An ABT Film Festival. Presented over two nights, Wednesday, September 30 and Thursday, October 1 at 7:00pm ET, Moving Stories features eight short films created by ABT artists. The films, varying from three to 11 minutes in length, will be available for viewing on ABT’s YouTube Channel. Four films will premiere each evening, followed by roundtable conversations with the filmmakers. The hour-long programs are hosted by ABT Principal Dancer Misty Copeland and Emmy Award-winning producer Leyla Fayyaz (Life in Motion Productions).

Filmmakers contributing to the Company’s first-ever film festival include current ABT dancers Claire Davison (Dans Tes Rêve), Zhong-Jing Fang (Perception), Erica Lall (The Thread of Navigation), Duncan Lyle (Alone Together), Jose Sebastian (Sillage), Eric Tamm (Le Tré Cortegé), Isabella Boylston and James Whiteside (Swan Lake), and former ABT dancer Alexandre Hammoudi (Transonata). All films were created in May and June 2020, as dancers sheltered in place and maintained strict COVID-19 health and safety precautions.

Read the full article here.

Dance Magazine: The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Just Awarded Four Dance Artists $275,000 Each

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By Jennifer Stahl

17 September 2020

At a time when many artists are feeling more financially strained than ever before, one of the most coveted grants in the arts is expanding. The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has responded to the economic crisis by handing out eight Doris Duke Artist Awards, up from six in 2019.

What’s more, half of those have gone to dance artists: Ana María Alvarez of CONTRA-TIEMPO in Los Angeles, Sean Dorsey of San Francisco’s Sean Dorsey Dance and Fresh Meat Festival, Rennie Harris of Philadelphia’s Rennie Harris Puremovement and New York City contemporary choreographer Pam Tanowitz.

The 2020 Doris Duke Artist Awards come with a $275,000 grant—$250,000 of which is completely unrestricted, plus $25,000 meant to encourage savings for retirement.

This year’s other awardees include jazz musicians Andrew Cyrille and Cécile McLorin Salvant and playwrights Michael John Garcés and Dael Orlandersmith.

Read the full article here.

TRG Arts: Arts and Culture Comeback Planning: September 2020

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By TRG Arts

17 September 2020

Sharp Fall in Optimism Among U.S. Arts and Culture Organizations for Return to In-Person Performances in 2020

September Study Reveals Increase in U.K. and Decline in Canadian Organizations’ Optimism

TRG Arts published its findings to an initial study of 74 clients’ performance return plans in June 2020. The findings from that report can be found here. An update to that study, expanded to 133 arts and culture organizations across three countries and published in July, reflected waning optimism for an autumn return to in-person live performances and a formal turn to paid digital programming after shutdowns caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The study was refreshed and expanded on September 2, 2020, and represents 219 organizations’ current scenario plans for returning to in-person paid performance, as well as those same organizations’ plans for offering paid digital programming. Responses reflect arts and culture organizations across all disciplines of arts and culture in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The study does not contemplate howclient organizations will operationalize live in-person performances. TRG has learned the delivery method and specifics for returning to in-person performances are highly variable, and rely on national and local guidance.

Regional Outlooks Reflect Level of Viral Containment

As the number of Americans testing positive for COVID-19 continues to grow, optimism for a 2020 in-person return to performances sharply fell for U.S. arts and culture leaders. The September study reveals 23% of U.S. organizations expect to perform to in-person audiences in 2020, compared to 61% in the initial June study.

Positive containment and infection reduction in the U.K. reveal more optimism for a 2020 in-person return to performances, while flaring cases in some provinces of Canada decreased optimism as described in Table 1.

Read the full study here.

San Francisco Classical Voice: Ballet’s New Mandate: Change or Die

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By Lou Fancher

14 September 2020

Six months after the coronavirus pandemic shuttered performing-arts venues in mid-March, there are more unsettling questions than there are comforting answers about the future of dance — and classical and contemporary ballet in particular.

Adding tilt to the unsteady imbalance are the art form’s longstanding gender inequities and worldwide social-justice protests related to racism after the most recent killing of Black Americans at the hands of law enforcement. The open wounds of gender and racial inequities that lay across American history and current affairs have left deep imprints on the entire dance world.

In this environment float the presumptions and principles that have led to ballet companies directed generally by men; with more white dancers than people of color in ballet company ranks; with more funding for white-led dance company boards and management, and more commissions and grants awarded to white applicants or for projects with Western, Eurocentric origins and focus. White is not just found in the classical tutus found of Swan Lake or Giselle, but across the entire ballet landscape.

During the unwelcome furlough of COVID-19, companies large and small cancelled annual Nutcrackers, the ballet world’s major money-making machine, and often enough, the bedrock funding for entire seasons. This raises existential questions, but also opportunities to reflect on how companies can more broadly represent their communities. What are dance artists and organizations willing to change, and will it be enough to sustain the art form?

Searching for artists who might be pushing the parameters with results lasting beyond quick, flashy trends, I talked to Trey McIntyre, Amy Seiwert, and Gregory Dawson, three choreographers/artistic directors whose work has risen to prominence and receives considerable local, national and international attention. I asked them what they are doing to keep their companies afloat and invited them to speak about their perspectives on dance, ballet, digital dance offerings, and the state of the art.

Read the full article here.

Dance Magazine: What Intimacy Coordinators Could Bring to How Love and Sex Are Portrayed in Dance

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By Zachary Whittenburg

16 September 2020

In October 2018, HBO made news with an announcement that it would engage specialists to ensure sex scenes in every movie and series it produced were handled safely and professionally. Some characterized the network’s new policy as a move to stem the tide of #MeToo allegations in entertainment, proof themselves that the industry had failed to self-regulate.

In the two years since, intimacy coordinators have become increasingly present behind the camera; performers have grown more comfortable stipulating they be hired proactively, too.

The circumstances that require intimacy coordination on set—called “intimacy direction” in live theater—tend to be self-evident. “We’re talking about any instance of nudity, simulated sex or deep physical intimacy,” says Claire Warden, creative team member at leading industry group Intimacy Directors and Coordinators.

Dance, however, is an art form that frequently involves the kind of bodily contact that, in a nondance context, would be watched extremely closely, perhaps nervously. “Deep physical intimacy” is simply the dancer’s stock-in-trade.

Despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that dancers are often nearly as comfortable with other bodies as they are with their own, it’s important to make and maintain space for honesty about personal limits and power dynamics.

“Because so much of dance is touch-based, our boundaries are really muddy,” says Sarah Lozoff, certified by IDC and resident intimacy director at both the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and RudduR Dance (to Lozoff’s knowledge the first dance-centered organization to create and fill such a role). “We explore and experiment with each other in the studio, and then maybe we change in front of each other in the dressing room, and then we hug each other goodbye.”

“In dance, there’s this implicit devotion to give your body to this form and to the teachers and mentors and choreographers who are then going to direct it and mold it and shape it,” says choreographer Faye Driscoll, who acknowledges how attractive that sense of surrender can be. “There’s an underpinning of, ‘My body isn’t just for me. My body is for this vision, this work, this thing,’ and that’s something I was very much drawn to as a dancer.”

Read the full Dance Magazine article here.

New York Times: Watching a Choreographer Build: Trisha Brown’s Unusual Archive

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By Siobhan Burke

16 September 2020

In a video recorded in 1989, the choreographer Trisha Brown demonstrates a few restless seconds of movement, as dancers in her studio try to follow along. An arm darts across the torso; the legs appear to slip and catch themselves. It happens fast. As the dancers attempt to do as she does, a viewer can imagine how useful the video would be for anyone learning this material. There’s no easy way to explain what she’s doing; you just have to keep watching.

In her decades of dazzling experiments with the body, gravity and momentum, Brown invented movement so complex — so capricious yet precise — it could be hard to remember from one day to the next, let alone years later if the work were to live on. As if to keep tabs on her discoveries, the camera became a regular presence in her studio, a tool as pragmatic as her choreography was wild. By recording the building of a dance, she could revisit what had rushed forth in a solo improvisation, or retrace how a group of dancers had achieved an improbable lift.

“Her movement is so sequential, and there’s a whole logic for how it spills through the body,” said Cori Olinghouse, a former dancer with Brown’s company, who served as its archive director from 2009 to 2018. “I think recording it was a way to try to recover something of that logic when nobody could remember.”

Read the full article here.

Broadway World: Hubbard Street Dance Chicago Announces 43rd Season Plans

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By BWW News Desk

14 September 2020

Hubbard Street Dance Chicago today announced its 2020/21 43rd season, to include virtual presentations of new work by five acclaimed choreographers, all with ties to the company: Rena Butler, Jonathan Fredrickson, Penny Saunders, Robyn Mineko Williams and Connie Shiau.

Launching the season will be a world premiere created by Butler, former Hubbard Street dancer and choreographic fellow, on Thursday, Oct. 22. The full-company piece is an examination of Butler’s perception of her home city of Chicago. Filmed in parks throughout the city, the work was inspired by GoodKids MadCity, an organization led by Black and Brown young people in Chicago advocating for the tools and resources needed to put an end to violence in their communities.

Butler’s 25-minute work, currently untitled, was filmed by Talia Koylass. It features music by composer Darryl Hoffman, as well as songs by vocalists Shawnee Dez and Alencia Norris. The work is performed by the full HDSC company. Performing with the company are the choreographer, Jessica Tong, recently named HSDC’s Associate Artistic Director, and Jonathan Emanuell Alsberry, Artistic Liaison. In addition to the presentation of the filmed piece, there will be a live, interactive conversation with Butler and other members of the creative team. The choreography, casting, rehearsals, and shooting amidst the coronavirus required the dancers to perform at a distance from one another, or in groups of dancers who reside together, while wearing personal protective equipment such as masks.

Read the full article here.