July 31st: Community Engagement Artists and Creatives Grant, 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
Dance Data Project® today released the updated “Top 50” list of United States ballet companies, which will make up the sample of ballet companies studied by the research team for 2020 reports associated with ballet company repertoire and operations.
By Rachel Moore
Rachel Moore has the kind of deep background in the arts that compels people to listen when she speaks. After identifying as a dancer all her life and dancing professionally with American Ballet Theatre for six years, she found a calling in advocating for artists’ rights. Eventually she returned to ABT as executive director/CEO, a position she held for 11 years. In 2015, she became president and CEO for The Music Center in Los Angeles, the largest performing arts center on the West Coast. —DBW
While there are those who suggest that executive leadership requires you to have “all the answers,” I don’t agree. Instead, I believe that true leadership articulates where one wants to go; why the desired destination is important; and what the values are that those on the journey should embrace. The nuts and bolts of how one gets there is a collective process that requires the talents and skills of a diverse team of people.
Rather than them trying to do it all, I offer this advice for leaders in our field:
As Doris Kearns Goodwin famously noted in her biography of Abraham Lincoln, “Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.“ The point is not to get to your decision; but, rather, to determine the right decision. Research shows, time and again, that diverse teams are smarter, more productive and more innovative. (See “Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter,” by David Rock and Heidi Grant, for instance, in Harvard Business Review.)As you build your team, be honest about your strengths and weaknesses and hire people who are different from you and who have differing skills sets. Reach outside your comfort zone and curate your team to be strong and capable as one unit.
In my book, The Artist’s Compass, I suggest that one establish a group of personal advisors who will provide support and advice. I call this a “personal board of directors.” These advisors should be people who support you as an individual (rather than just your organization). They should have the skills or knowledge you lack, challenge you in different ways, tell you the truth no matter what, and understand your professional goals while bringing different points of view to the table. Having people with whom you can vent, strategize, brainstorm, etc., without having to worry about the politics of your workplace, is revelatory and a true stress reliever.
Read the full article here.
By Neil Genzlinger
21 February 2020
Tobi Tobias, whose dance criticism for New York magazine and other outlets made her an influential voice in the genre for decades, died on Feb. 13 at her home in Manhattan. She was 81.
Her husband, Irwin Tobias, confirmed the death. He said she had been in declining health for some time.
Ms. Tobias, who was also the author of a number of children’s books, began writing about dance in the early 1970s, starting with an article about Twyla Tharp for the alumni magazine of Barnard College, both women’s alma mater. Armed with that and another article about Ms. Tharp for a different publication — the sum total of her dance writing at that point — she offered her services to Dance Magazine.
To her surprise, William Como, the editor in chief, called her in for an interview. Although they differed about a lot of things — “Just for instance, he was a Béjart guy; I was a Balanchine gal,” she wrote on her blog some 40 years later — he enlisted her as a writer and, later in the decade, as an editor of other critics.
She became the dance critic at New York magazine in 1980 and held that post for 22 years. She also wrote for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Bloomberg News and the website Arts Journal, among other outlets.
Her articles for Arts Journal made her a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in criticism. The Pulitzer judges singled her out for “work that reveals passion as well as deep historical knowledge of dance, her well-expressed arguments coming from the heart as well as the head.”
Read the full obituary here.
25 February 2020
The Harvey Weinstein verdict is at once gravely disappointing and grimly satisfying.
Until the verdict, the only sliver of satisfaction came from the fact that the legacy he built had been destroyed. Now, though, because he’s been convicted of two out of five counts — rape and criminal sexual act — the first line in his obituary won’t be about his Oscars or “alleged” acts, but about his felony convictions. His name will also forever be synonymous with the worst excesses of the entertainment world, whose power brokers have too often acted as if they were above the law. Harvey Weinstein is going to prison, and that is profound. (He faces other, similar charges in Los Angeles.)
So, Weinstein is no more. Yet there are no silver linings here. Women were hurt and traumatized, and their lives and careers irreparably damaged. The verdict doesn’t change that. Yes, there was a surge in activism after news of his abuse broke in October 2017, but women were already angry, already organizing. The African-American activist Tarana Burke launched #MeToo in 2006; the first Women’s March took place in Jan. 2017, the day after Donald J. Trump became president. In the end, Weinstein is part of a far larger story about contemporary feminist activism, including in the entertainment industry, where women have been fighting sexism for decades.
That sexism is both systemic and symptomatic of the industry’s history of acting as if it is above the law. This has led to a wide range of exploitation including racism and on-set fatalities, exploitation that has been habitually rationalized as the cost those without power pay for doing business in a putatively glamorous industry. It’s hard to think of another business, outside of sex work, that has sexually exploited people so openly and whose abusive practices — emblematized by the casting couch — have been trivialized, at times with leering giggles. It’s well-known that the industry is a grossly exploitative of both men and women — why have we tolerated this?
Read the full article in the New York Times.
NEWS that a Russian will become the new artistic director of Ballet Philippines (BP), replacing National Artist Alice Reyes after her term ends in March, has sparked a social media uproar in cultural circles, inspiring a Change.org petition and a demand that the appointment be rescinded.
“We the Ballet Philippines community, dance artists, alumni, and artistic team, are united in the belief that Ballet Philippines is Filipino, for the Filipinos, and by Filipinos,” declares a statement addressed “To the Ballet Philippines Foundation, Inc. Board of Trustees,” which has been spread through social media with the hashtag #WeAreBalletPhilippines.
“We call on the Board to revoke the appointment of the foreign national Mr. Mikhail Martynyuk as Artistic Director,” it continues.
There is also a Change.org petition asking the BP Board to “to rescind or revise the contract offered to a Russian artist from a position as Artistic Director to another honored artist position in Ballet Philippines and to keep the position of Artistic Director Filipino.” It has garnered 2,558 signatures as of posting.
Read the full article online here.
By Julia Jacobs
19 February 2020
A half-hour before the start of “West Side Story,” two dozen protesters outside the Broadway Theater inched closer to the production’s turf.
Blocked by parked cars from their usual spot in the street, they instead occupied the sidewalk alongside ticket holders, many of whom looked quizzically at the demonstrators’ signs and fliers.
“Hey hey, ho ho, Ramasar has got to go,” they chanted, as they have on several other nights outside the show, referring to Amar Ramasar, a “West Side Story” cast member who was fired, and then reinstated, at New York City Ballet after sending sexually explicit photos of his girlfriend to another dancer.
The protesters object to his casting in the show, in which he is playing Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks street gang, a high-profile role that involves a lot of strutting across the stage with an air of machismo, and, at times, lust. Mr. Ramasar’s critics assert that his inclusion in the cast is inappropriate given his previous behavior.
Read the full article in the New York Times.
By Alex Marshall
20 February 2020
Some of the dance world’s biggest names threatened to withdraw work from the repertoire of the Lyon Opera Ballet — a major French company — this week unless it reinstated its former artistic director.
“This is with a heavy heart,” they wrote in an open letter published in Libération, a major newspaper in France. But, they added, they saw “no other solutions.”
Yorgos Loukos, the Lyon company’s artistic director since 1991, was fired this month after a French court found him guilty of discriminating against a dancer. Mr. Loukos had refused to give the dancer a contract when she returned from maternity leave.
The Lyon Opera Ballet’s decision to fire him was “incomprehensible and arbitrary,” said the letter, which called on the French government to intervene.
The letter — in which stars appeared to hold a company to ransom — contained the signatures of around 100 people, including Benjamin Millepied, William Forsythe, and the European choreographers Jiri Kylian and Mats Ek. Sylvie Guillem, the French ballet star who retired in 2015, was listed as a signatory, as was the actress Isabelle Huppert.
But when The New York Times contacted some of the letter’s signees for comment, several disavowed it.
“I was asked to sign, but declined, because the letter spoke to internal matters of the theater of which I have no direct experience or knowledge, and I do not agree with the coercive tactics,” Mr. Forsythe said in an email.
Read the full article in the New York Times.
By Chava Lansky
Yesterday, the first of Nike’s new Common Thread video series dropped, and we were thrilled to see that it featured dancers; namely, Dance Theatre of Harlem member (and June/July 2017 Pointe cover star) Ingrid Silva, and Florida-based ballet student Alex Thomas. Even better, it’s narrated by tennis phenom Serena Williams. This series of short videos celebrates Black History Month by focusing on representation in sport. (We’re not crazy about ballet being called a sport, but we’ll let it slide.) In each installment, athletes united by a common thread discuss their passion, and the lack of role models they saw in their fields while growing up.
Interspersed with gorgeous dance footage, Silva and Thomas tell each other their stories. Silva talks about growing up in Brazil, and how it wasn’t until she moved to New York to train at DTH that she saw dancers who looked like her. Thomas discusses the loneliness he felt as the only dancer of color in his childhood studio. “Representation matters, and you can’t become something you don’t see,” says Silva, who later adds, “Directors have to take the first step in hiring dancers of color, so the stage looks like what the rest of the world looks like.”
Watch this inspirational video below now!
Read the full post on Pointe’s blog.
By Lyndsey Winship
18 February 2020
Jacqueline du Pré danced with her cello. In concert footage, her body sighs and sways as her music soars. But it’s a leap from lyrical presence on the podium to transposing Du Pré’s tragically short life into dance, a challenge taken up by choreographer Cathy Marston in her first main stage commission for the Royal Ballet.
The Cellist comes in a double bill with Jerome Robbins’ 1969 Dances at a Gathering – Chopin piano, dreamy pastels, choreography of conversational nuance and lovely, subtle dancing – but it’s Marston’s ingenuity we’re all here to see. She is bold in having a dancer (Marcelino Sambé) embody the cello itself, kneeling in front of Du Pré (a radiant Lauren Cuthbertson), arm raised like the neck of the instrument as the cellist draws her hand across the air holding an invisible bow.
This picture spirals off into something more expansive, but they return to the motif. Mostly it seems to work, although there are cumbersome moments of pas de deux, not least due to the awkwardness of the cellist’s wide-legged stance. But there’s also the easy flow of bodies entwined, the way artist, instrument and music become one.
Composer Philip Feeney weaves extracts from Du Pré’s rep into his score and Marston has Du Pré and conductor Daniel Barenboim (Matthew Ball) fall in love on the concert stage, locking eyes over Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Aware of the music’s importance, Marston crowds the scene, with the imperious Ball dancing off the podium, an orchestra of dancers rising and falling and Cuthbertson changing from bright innocent girl to woman in love as we watch. It’s arguably an overload, although more generally the whirlwind of motion evokes exactly the giddy joy and genius shown in Christopher Nupen’s film The Trout, featuring Du Pré and Barenboim in their youthful prime.
Read the full review in The Guardian.
