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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

Los Angeles Times: L.A.’s dance crisis: Studios fight to survive the pandemic

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By Makeda Easter

2 September 2020

The announcements coming from L.A. dance studios feel eerily similar.

In June, an Instagram post from Pieter Performance Space in Lincoln Heights began: “It is with a heavy heart we share news of the departure from our studio home.”

In a July email to supporters of his Silver Lake studio, Ryan Heffington — the choreographer behind Netflix’s “The OA” and Sia’s “Chandelier” video — wrote: “Due to the uncertainty of our lives, both currently and for the foreseeable future, I’ve decided to take the Sweat Spot entity virtual.”

In August, after the announced sale of Hollywood’s Television Center, Edge Performing Arts Center cofounders Bill Prudich and Randall Allaire posted on Instagram: “We have just been informed that Edge will not be part of the building’s future development. … Their plans, combined with the hardship created by the COVID-19 mandatory closures have resulted in this outcome.”

The flurry of goodbye-for-now messages, combined with desperate pleas for support across social media and GoFundMe, paint a picture of a dance landscape in crisis. Without dance studios, professionals lose their places to train or work out new art before it appears to the masses. And amateurs lose their go-to outlet for creative expression or alternative to boring workouts.

Mandatory coronavirus-related closures have wiped out most income for dance studios, which rely on in-person classes, rentals and performances. And although many studios have shifted to online learning, it may not generate enough income to last through the uncertain months ahead.

Read the full article here.

New York Times: The School That Camille A. Brown Built

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By Salamishah Tillet

2 September 2020

Camille A. Brown can’t remember the first time she danced the Electric Slide. She only remembers doing it. “It just was,” she said in a recent Zoom interview. “It’s the same thing with the Running Man or double Dutch. I don’t remember the first time I had a rope in my hand, but I remember the freedom.”

Ms. Brown, 40, a renowned dancer and one of the most sought-after choreographers of her generation, didn’t learn those social dances in school. She picked them up from family and friends — along with a host of other moves with roots in West Africa that African-Americans have passed down, from one generation to another, traded at family reunions and house parties or brought to pop culture and music videos.

Whether the Juba or stepping, social dance has always been a big component of Ms. Brown’s choreography. Her high energy, historically sweeping works are a powerful blend of modern, ballet, hip-hop, West African and African-American vernacular forms.

In recent years, Ms. Brown has expanded beyond the dance world. She was nominated for a Tony Award for her work on “Choir Boy” in 2019, and choreographed “Porgy and Bess” at the Metropolitan Opera. This year would have brought other new challenges: She was slated to make her debut as a theater director with “Ain’t Misbehavin” at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., in August; and was tapped to direct the Broadway revival of Ntozake Shange’s theater piece, “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” which would have opened this fall. (It is aiming for a 2021 premiere.)

When the pandemic hit, Ms. Brown was on a career high, but like everyone in the performing arts she had to pivot. And like many other dancers and choreographers, she turned to Instagram, where she has created a virtual version of a school she never attended, one in which social dance is the foundation from which everything else flows.

“When everything stopped and shut down,” Ms. Brown said, “it gave me an opportunity to process everything that I had been doing, particularly in the last two years.”

Read the full article here.

New York Times: In Her Words: Ideal, Perfect, Ultimate

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By Corinne Purtill

1 September 2020

In 2012, scholars Christine M. Beckman and Melissa Mazmanian set out to examine the lives of overstretched middle- to upper-middle-class working parents. Prior studies on so-called work-life balance, they noticed, tended to treat working families’ days as if they could be neatly disassembled into tidy blocks of time: family time here, work hours there, a few minutes of household chores or personal care scattered in between.

But the more time they spent with their research subjects — nine Southern California families, all with children under 12 and at least one parent employed full-time — it was clear the average day didn’t operate like that at all.

Equipped with devices that allowed them to be accessible to all of the people in their lives, all the time, working parents toggled constantly between competing commitments: discreetly texting the babysitter during work meetings, reading over spreadsheets on the sidelines of soccer games, ordering dinner on the rushed commute home. Women — and to a lesser degree, men — did everything, all at once, in ever-increasing amounts, and were exhausted from the stress of chasing an unattainable ideal of perfection.

Beckman and Mazmanian examine the beliefs that fuel these efforts in their book, “Dreams of the Overworked,” published in June. Their thesis is framed around three core myths that tend to influence parents’ choices: the myth of the ideal worker, the myth of the perfect parent, and the myth of the ultimate body, which in this context refers less to the pursuit of Barbie-type proportions than to attentive stewardship of one’s own health. (If you’ve ever been exhausted, yet also convinced that you “should” use a moment of downtime to fit in a run or another form of exercise, you have dallied with this myth.)

Read the entire article here.

New York Times: In Her Words: Melinda Gates

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By Francesca Donner

23 August 2020

On March 7, 2020, Melinda Gates published an Op-Ed in The New York Times to mark International Women’s Day.
Today, she wrote, take a moment to start a conversation about gender equality, preferably with someone you’ve never discussed it with before. “It will take 208 years to close major gender gaps in the United States — but this should only take a few minutes.”
Broadly, we may think of gender inequality as the sweeping injustices levied against women and girls on a global scale — among them sex trafficking, domestic violence, child marriage, maternal mortality, inadequate reproductive care, a technological divide, and gaps in economics and education performance.
But for Ms. Gates, it seems personal too.
When she joined Microsoft in the late 1980s, the tech firm wasn’t exactly a paradise for female employees. Her decision to leave the work force to raise her daughter when she became a mother, while not one she regrets, now gives her pause. At the time, “I just assumed that’s what women do,” she wrote in her 2019 book, “The Moment of Lift.” “I had a lot of growing up to do.” And for a long time, even her work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where she shares the title of co-chair with her husband, Bill Gates, wasn’t exactly equal, with Mr. Gates the de facto spokesperson in the public eye and Ms. Gates — by choice — behind the scenes.
So it’s no wonder that gender equality factors so prominently in her work and her words. And it’s certainly no different in a world transformed by a pandemic.
Read the full Q&A online here.

New York Times: Dancing in the Streets of Harlem, and Gathering to Dance, Merce-Style

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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.

Pointe: Beyond Solidarity Statements: The Real Work Ballet Organizations Must Do to Dismantle Systemic Racism

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By Shaté L. Hayes

25 August 2020

Black squares on your organization’s social media profile. Posting videos and images of the Black dancers within your company or school. Buttoned up, PR-approved statements that fall in line with what everyone else is saying and doing. Many Black dancers have had enough of performative solidarity from ballet organizations, stemming from the uprisings over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others. It feels trendy, and it’s not landing.

“I see some companies grappling with it, and I see others patching things, wordsmithing a statement, or negotiating how much responsibility they want to take,” says Theresa Ruth Howard, founder of Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet who’s also an educator, writer, consultant to The Equity Project and seasoned diversity strategist. “When it’s about checking boxes, it’s clear it’s performative.”

Where some organizations are missing the mark is in the misalignment between what they’re posting outwardly and what their dancers of color are experiencing behind closed doors. When a ballet organization’s culture doesn’t feel “Black- or brown-friendly,” as Howard frames it, then any statement promoting racial justice won’t resonate with those who experience something different day to day.

Black dancers are still experiencing various forms of racism in ballet. Sometimes it’s clear macroaggressions, not unlike voter suppression or redlining, where certain groups are kept from equal opportunities. This was the case with Alexis Carter-Black, who says she was told by an instructor at her daughter Ainsley’s ballet school that they didn’t think students should get private lessons and later witnessed that same instructor giving a private lesson to a white dancer. “It seemed like they’d do anything to keep her from progressing,” says Carter-Black.

Other times racism comes in the form of microaggressions—very subtle discriminatory language or behavior that’s harder to prove but still stings nonetheless. For a Black Brazilian dancer, it’s being asked if you can speak English. For the Black dance mom, it’s being called “aggressive” when you ask an instructor about how she handled a conversation with your daughter about her hair. For choreographer Ja’ Malik, who danced with numerous ballet companies and is director and founder of Ballet Boy Productions, it’s being asked if you have a background in African or hip hop when your materials clearly indicate otherwise.

Read the full article here.

The Guardian: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater: Shelter review – moves with our times

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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.

Democrat & Chronicle: Trailblazer Aesha Ash chosen as first Black female full-time faculty at School of American Ballet

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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.

Palm Beach Daily News: Miami City Ballet revamps season as pandemic persists

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18 August 2020

Miami City Ballet revamps season as COVID-19 pandemic lingers, replacing in-person shows with planned digital and outdoor alternatives

After spending the five months since the COVID-19 pandemic hit South Florida revising scenarios for the 2020-21 season, Miami City Ballet’s leaders have made a decision.

There will be no in-person performances as announced when the company unveiled its 35th season in March.

At least for now.

Instead, the company plans to roll out a mix of online recordings of performances of new commissions and older works, livestreams from its black-box theater, and outdoor performances.

“I call it an interim season,” Artistic Director Lourdes Lopez said. “This is what we can do during this period until we can get back on stage.”

The schedule hasn’t been solidified.

Buyers of the $1.9 million worth of subscriptions the company has sold will have several options: a refund; a credit for the 2021-22 season, when the company hopes to perform the works originally announced for 2020-21; donating the cost to a newly established Dancer Support Fund; or a combination of choices.

Company leaders never expected the pandemic to drag on this long when they canceled “Don Quixote,” the final program of the 2019-20 season; scrapped the gala; and sent the dancers home on March 13, Executive Director Tania Castroverde Moskalenko said.

Read the full article here.

CBS News: Aesha Ash is making history at New York City’s School of American Ballet

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By Elaine Quijano

17 August 2020

New York — After 86 years, New York City’s famed School of American Ballet is making history not on the stage, but in the classroom, when Aesha Ash becomes the school’s first Black female permanent faculty member.

Ash hopes to make a difference for her students.

“I feel that I have this hyper-awareness now of that dancer who’s struggling … and sort of see that sort of self-doubt creeping in,” she explained.

As a teenager, she had those self-doubts in a school with a mostly-White student population.

“When you look at performances, when you look at footage, when you see images on the wall … are everything but your own, that is saying something to the dancers around,” Ash said.

But she persevered, earning a spot with the New York City Ballet — one of only a few dancers of color.

Read the full article here.