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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

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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

Duke Performances Virtual Fall Season Includes Global Conversations Alum Stefanie Batten Bland

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By Michaela Dwyer

Working at the intersection of dance theater and installation, Jerome Robbins award-winning choreographer/director Stefanie Batten Bland rebuilds the built environment: whether in the overlapping gestures of dinner guests, seated at a dinner table on a proscenium stage; wrapped and writhing within corded ropes along the parquet floors of a French parlor; or adjacent to the stone pillars of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, in moving memoriam of victims of police brutality.

As part of Duke Performances’ virtual fall season, Batten Bland’s intercontinental interdisciplinary vessel, Company SBB, explores a new work created for camera: a continuation of Batten Bland’s dance cinema practice, in alignment with the new daily choreographies of quarantine. Working from upstate New York, through river tributaries, Batten Bland marshals an intimate configuration of her company to underline historical and present-day directional up- and downstate tensions in the region during the pandemic. Those familiar with Batten Bland’s Duke Performances-commissioned work for the American Ballet Theatre Studio Company will see a thematic throughline in her ongoing investigation of monumentality: what’s upheld and what’s overturned in the material and geographical remaking of our relations.

Learn more and buy tickets here.

NPR: Enough Already: Multiple Demands Causing Women To Abandon Workforce

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By Avie Schneider, Andrea Hsu, & Scott Horsley

2 October 2020

Here’s a stunning stat: Women are leaving the workforce at four times the rate as men.

The burden of parenting and running a household while also working a job during the pandemic has created a pressure cooker environment in many households, and women are bearing the brunt of it.

It has come to a head as a new school year starts with many children staying home instead of returning to their classrooms in person because of the pandemic. And its forcing many women to make a difficult choice and drop out of the workforce altogether.

Just in September, 865,000 women over 20 dropped out of the American workforce compared with 216,000 men in the same age group, the Labor Department reported Friday.

“It was a really startling difference,” said University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson. “The child care crisis is wreaking havoc on women’s employment.”

Youli Lee is one of those women who hit the breaking point of working from home while caring for her children. She took a leave of absence from her federal job after finding it impossible to do her normal work from home while her three children — ages 8, 11, and 13 — were also at home doing virtual school.

Listen to the coverage or read the full article here.

Chicago Tribune: In ‘painful’ decision, Joffrey Ballet of Chicago cancels 2020-21 season

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By Chris Jones

1 October 2020

The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago said Thursday that it has canceled its entire 2020-21 season at the Lyric Opera House.

The canceled programing includes the world premiere of Cathy Marston’s “Of Mice and Men” and the Joffrey premiere of George Balanchine’s “Serenade” (slated for Feb. 17-28, 2021), as well as the Chicago premiere of John Neumeier’s “The Little Mermaid” (April 21-May 2, 2021). Previously, Joffrey had canceled this fall’s production of Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” (Oct. 14-25) and the first staging at the Lyric of Christopher Wheeldon’s “The Nutcracker” (December 5-27), typically a huge source of revenue for the company and a highlight of the holiday season in Chicago, drawing tens of thousands to the Loop.

The Joffrey said that the decision, sparked by the COVID-19 crisis, will cost the non-profit institution in excess of $9 million at the box office. A philanthropic fund, dubbed the Joffrey Crisis Stabilization Fund, has been set up to address the disparity and cover basic operations costs through the fall of 2021. The ballet said the fund currently has raised about $7 million toward its $12 million goal. The company has not laid off its company of dancers, guaranteeing their existing contracts through next May.

Read the full article here.

The Salt Lake Tribune: Ballet West will start letting dancers wear tights and shoes in their own skin color

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By Sean P. Means

1 October 2020

Ballet West dancers soon will be wearing tights and shoes that more closely resemble their own skin color — an effort to push back against a white bias in the ballet world going back decades.

“I believe a more diverse and inclusive organization is a stronger Ballet West,” Adam Sklute, Ballet West’s artistic director, said in a statement issued by the troupe Thursday. “It is time we hold a mirror to ourselves and examine how our art form — and how Ballet West — can do better in dismantling systems that do not foster equity, and to institutionalize structures that do.”

The Salt Lake City-based troupe announced a series of policy changes to make Ballet West’s studio and stage “more welcoming to dancers of color.” These changes are:

• Ballet West will no longer allow makeup that indicates a race or ethnicity other than the dancer’s own.

• The troupe will no longer use historic “paling” body makeup for women in works — “Swan Lake” and “Giselle” are mentioned — whose major roles are traditionally depicted as pale white.

• The company will provide tights and shoe straps that more closely match the dancer’s skin tone.

Read the full article here.

Pointe Magazine: “My Plate Is Full”: Sofiane Sylve on Her New Leadership Roles at Ballet San Antonio and Dresden Semperoper

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By Claudia Bauer

28 September 2020

Sofiane Sylve had huge plans for 2020: Departing her post as a principal dancer at San Francisco Ballet, she embarked on a multifaceted, bicontinental career as ballet master and principal dancer at Dresden Semperoper Ballett, and artistic advisor and school director at Ballet San Antonio—and then COVID-19 hit, sidelining performances and administrative plans at both companies. But ballet dancers are nothing if not resilient. In her new leadership roles, Sylve is determined to help shepherd ballet through this challenging time—and transform it for the better. Pointe caught up with her by phone while she was in Dresden.

You started these amazing new positions, and then COVID happened. How have you had to adapt?

In Dresden, La Bayadère can’t happen because of the amount of people in the cast, and the costumes and wigs. BSA had to cancel October’s Don Quixote. We’re not sure Nutcracker is going to happen. I can’t have it on my conscience to have 25 dancers in a room, even if I do everything in San Antonio that Germany has been doing. In Germany, you have to wear a mask everywhere you go, and you can’t use the dressing rooms. They open the studios five minutes before you can go in, it’s only an hour class, they shuffle you out and clean for the entire hour. You need cleaning staff 24/7—no U.S. company has a budget for that.

How are you juggling these pivotal responsibilities at two companies—not to mention the travel?

I wanted my plate to be full, and it’s full, and I’m loving it. But with COVID, the travel is very difficult—I can get into Texas, but I could get stuck because of travel restrictions. I am on Zoom all day; I’ve hired BSA dancers and ballet masters on Zoom, and we do a lot of classes online. You see people in their homes, they see me running around with my dogs. In a way, it’s made us seem more human to each other.

Read the full article here.

New York Times: Dance on Film Is the Only Game in Town. BalletX Takes the Field.

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By Brian Seibert

24 September 2020

This much we know: Another fall season of ballet is beginning, and almost none of it will take place in person. Ballet companies need to make dance films, and they need to be better than the forgiveably slapdash “we’re still here” video postcards of the early pandemic period.

The big guns, like New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater, have announced plans for premieres in the coming months. But a much smaller troupe, BalletX in Philadelphia, is ahead of the game. On Wednesday night, it released four new works.

These works will remain available indefinitely, but they aren’t free. To watch them, you have to subscribe to BalletX Beyond, which also gives you access to premieres later in the season, along with extras like interviews and making-of documentaries. The cheapest plan is $15 a month — less than a ticket to a live show but almost as much as premium Netflix. It’s a necessary experiment, especially for companies without huge endowments. Somebody has to figure out how to get people to pay for digital dance.

One enticement is to offer films that at least look professional and try to take advantage of the medium. On this score, the new BalletX films succeed. The choreographers have collaborated with skilled filmmakers. And while not ranging far from Philadelphia, the locations suggest a world much wider, varied and visually exciting than a dance studio or the inside of a dancer’s apartment.
Read the full article here.

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.

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.