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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

New York Times: Nina Popova, Dancer Who Fled Bolsheviks and Nazis, Dies at 97

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By John Leland

21 August 2020

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

Nina Popova was a celebrated ballet dancer who escaped the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Nazis in Paris. It was the coronavirus that ultimately caught up to her.

She died on Aug. 7 at Flagler Hospital in St. Augustine, Fla., with a nurse holding her hand, her daughter, Irene Arriola, said. She was 97.

Nina Popova was born in Novorossiysk, Russia, on Oct. 20, 1922, two months before the Soviet Union was established. Her parents, Paul Popoff and Natalie Yacovleff, decided it was time to leave the country. They landed in Paris with their new baby in their arms. Mr. Popoff, who had been a hydroelectric engineer in his home country, joined the ranks of Russian cabdrivers there; his wife found work as a seamstress.

They envisioned a career in ballet for their daughter, enrolling her in a school with the children of other poor Russian refugees. Nina had a gift. At 12 she danced with the Russian opera in Barcelona, Spain, and at 14 she joined the Ballet de la Jeunesse, founded by the Russian ballerina Lubov Egorova.

As World War II and the Nazi occupation of France approached, she joined the Original Ballet Russe, directed by Wassily de Basil, which took her to Australia and eventually to Cuba, where she came to the attention of the directors of what would become American Ballet Theater in New York.

Read the full obituary here.

New York Times: Russian Ballet Returned to the Stage. Then a Covid Outbreak Hit.

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By Alex Marshall

19 August 2020

For the past three weeks, the Mariinsky Ballet, one of Russia’s most renowned companies, led the dance world in showing how ballet could return to the stage.

It hosted galas at its St. Petersburg theaters, featuring solos and duets performed by dancers who had undergone weekly tests for coronavirus.

More ambitiously, it had begun staging full-length ballets, with a run of the Romantic classic “La Sylphide.” Audience members were provided with masks and gloves, and seating was distanced, with an empty space between each viewer.

Then, on Aug. 13, the performances stopped. In a development that will concern other dance companies hoping to return to the stage, the Mariinsky Ballet has suspended all performances, classes and rehearsals, a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. (The Mariinsky’s opera and orchestral programs continue uninterrupted, the statement added.)

She did not answer questions about the reason for that suspension. But on Monday, Interfax, the Russian news service, reported that about 30 people in the company had contracted the coronavirus. Xander Parish, a British dancer who is a principal soloist with the Mariinsky, confirmed in a telephone interview that there had been an outbreak.

“They’ve tried really hard to be safe,” he said. “It’s not like our rehearsals have been badly organized or anything.”

Read the full New York Times article.

Dance Magazine: This Former Rockette Is Now a Mars 2020 Engineer—and She’s Still Dancing

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By Madeline Schrock

31 August 2020

As the Perseverance rover heads towards Mars, back on Earth, a crew of engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are supporting the Mars 2020 mission. One of those people is systems engineer Heather Ann Bottom. With a bachelor’s in astrophysics and a master’s in space engineering, she certainly fits the bill. But Bottom has a few extra qualifications on her resumé: She was a Rockette in New York City and in the Broadway national tour of A Chorus Line.

Careers in the arts and engineering might seem like polar opposites. But Bottom, 32, sees the benefits of applying her dance experience to her current role. “I have been able to recognize, as a dancer, what my strengths are,” she says. “Things like picking up choreography really quickly, being a visual learner are important to recognize. Then I can take that into my job and say, ‘Oh, the reason I’m getting this so quickly is because I’m a dancer. I understand it. I can put the steps together in my head.’ ”

“Or many times, I’ve related these grand, large-scale tests in the engineering world to like a dance performance—you have all the different players and they need to be in their spots at the right time and read the script correctly and all of that. Wherever I can recognize, ‘Oh, that’s a part of my dance self or my performing self that is now coming into the engineering world’ has really helped me embrace both sides.”

But this balance of dance and science wasn’t always a constant in her life.

Read the full article from Dance Magazine here.

Pittsburgh-Post Gazette: PBT’s new artistic director brings big dreams, open mind to dance in a pandemic

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By Sara Baukneckt

31 August 2020

Susan Jaffe remembers her reaction when she learned she would be Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s next artistic director.

“I was pacing back and forth. I could feel the tears coming down my face. I was hyperventilating, really,” she recalls. “Then I sat down and said, ‘Wait a minute. I can’t come. We’re in the middle of a pandemic.’”

She took the job anyway, reassured by PBT’s board that the company is financially sound and could weather the COVID-19 storm. Nearly two months in, she’s determined to help make sure that happens.

PBT announced last week that, due to pandemic restrictions and theater closures, it will hold open-air performances in lieu of indoor shows, beginning with shows next month outside its headquarters in the Strip District. For now, the 2021 portion of its schedule will remain as is.

The “Open Air Series” will run Sept. 10-14 and include appearances by Pittsburgh CLO, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Pittsburgh Opera, Jevon Rushton Group and special guests presented by the August Wilson African American Cultural Center.

PBT’s mainstage season had been set to open in late October with “Balanchine + Tchaikovsky” at Benedum Center. That will become a socially distanced outdoor experience in a new “mobile performing arts venue” outside PBT’s building. “The Nutcracker” is also being reimagined beyond a traditional theater setting.

Executive Director Harris Ferris says Ms. Jaffe is the right choice for artistic director “especially because of the adaptability that’s required with COVID-19 and the programming innovations that are needed. If we can’t get on the stages, we’ve got to figure out another way.”

Doing so comes with many questions, Ms. Jaffe says. How do you get students back in class safely? What about company dancers? Should only those who cohabitate be in a studio at the same time? Dressing rooms, or no dressing rooms?

…

Paying it forward

When Ms. Jaffe’s time on stage ended, her career as an educator, choreographer and administrator began.

“I really felt like it was my responsibility to give back,” she says. “Now I’m in service to ballet and to dance and to nurturing and bringing forth the next generation.”

In 2003-10, she taught in the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School of American Ballet Theatre and co-founded, owned and directed a dance studio. For two years, she worked as ballet mistress for ABT. She also created works for the company and other arts organizations across the country.

In 2012, Ms. Jaffe became dean of dance at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. She’s also a board member for the Youth America Grand Prix and Dance Magazine Awards.

She was working in North Carolina when she was approached by a search firm about the PBT position.

“I had built a very strong program and was very happy there,” she says. “But then I reminded myself that to be an artistic director was a lifelong dream for me, or at least through my adulthood.”

Her final interview was in March, shortly before COVID-19 shutdowns took effect. Concerned about getting on a plane during a pandemic, she drove to Pittsburgh from North Carolina for a two-day visit. Her personality, background and vision were deemed a match and she was unanimously approved by the board.

“She’s extremely approachable and amicable,” Mr. Ferris says. “She’s got the emotional stability that can steady the ship and keep everyone positively focused.”

Beyond navigating COVID-19, Ms. Jaffe has big ideas for PBT and its growing school. She wants more diversity in choreography, more collaborations with museums and other institutions and someday, perhaps a choreographic festival in Pittsburgh. In regards to the PBT School, additional satellite locations are being considered as a way to bring ballet into more communities.

Read the full article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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.