November 2020 – NEXTSTEPPAD

“P-Valley” Star Brandee Evans Brings Legit Dance Chops to the Show

Brandee Evans owes her dance career to one triple pirouette she turned as a high school senior.

The actress and dancer was auditioning for the University of Memphis dance team. A full scholarship was on the line, and without it, she couldn’t afford the university. Evans spent hours practicing on the concrete floor of her basement, cherry-picking tips from friends who had ballet and jazz training, and she learned tricks from her younger brother, who practiced karate. On Mother’s Day, she skipped church and went to campus, where she was among hundreds of girls going out for the squad.

“I think I was flat-footed, but I went around three times and I spotted,” she recalls, speaking recently from her home in Los Angeles. She was the only Black woman to make the varsity dance team. “I’ll always be proud of that moment,” Evans says.

Today, Evans has spun her way into the national dance spotlight, although not in a way that the churchgoing girl from Memphis, Tennessee, ever anticipated. On the critically hailed Starz network show “P-Valley,” Evans plays Mercedes, the star pole dancer at a Southern strip club who longs to retire and launch her own dance studio for teenage girls. Not everyone in the town thinks that’s an appropriate second act for a dancer who performs in rhinestone thongs. (As you might guess, the “P” in “P-Valley” is a slang term for female anatomy; the show may not be appropriate for younger viewers.) The finale airs on September 6.

“25 is the retirement age for strippers,” Mercedes says in the pilot episode, when she gives notice to the gender-fluid strip club owner Uncle Clifford, played by veteran director and choreographer Nicco Annan.

Mercedes is not really 25, and Evans declines to give her own age. But she acknowledges that “P-Valley” came along just as she was attempting to retire from dance-centric roles.

Courtesy Evans

After college, Evans became a high school English teacher who coached dance teams and danced for the Memphis Grizzlies on the side. But she spent her summers in Los Angeles, always striving to become a better dancer herself. Five years into this dual career, a choreographer spotted her in dance class, and the next thing Evans knew she was on Lil Wayne’s bus writing her resignation letter to the school she was teaching at.

That was 11 years ago. Gigs with the likes of Katy Perry, Snoop Dogg and Alicia Keys came and went. She was hired—and then fired—as a dance director for the Miami Heat. (The team thought her approach was “too tough,” Evans says.) She whipped teen dancers into shape on the Oprah Winfrey Network’s short-lived show “Dance Crash.” And when her mother’s multiple sclerosis became more advanced, Evans began teaching more “Hip Hop in Heels” classes in part to help pay rehabilitation-center bills.

By 2016, Evans had become a full-time caregiver for her mother, who also has Alzheimer’s. She needed to slow down, and told her agent “no more dance roles.” She booked gigs on “Lethal Weapon” on Fox, two BET miniseries and more. But when the script for “P-Valley” came along, Evans put her plans to “retire” from dancing on hold. Between her audition and her callback, that same determined dancer who turned a triple pirouette to pay for college signed up for pole-dance classes.

“It was like auditioning for the University of Memphis again, and telling myself, ‘You’re going to get this,’ ” Evans says.

Of the four actresses who play pole dancers on “P-Valley,” Evans is the only one performing most of her own stunts. In fact, she’d like to try more, but due to safety concerns, Starz has declared some moves off-limits. (Many are performed by her double, Spyda.) That didn’t stop her from sneaking into Tyler Perry Studios to practice late one night once filming got underway, with Annan there cheering her on until 3 am. Before the director called “action” the next day, Evans looked at the lead cameraman and said, “I’m going to the top.”

You can see the results on the first episode, when Evans mounts the pole upside down, pulling herself up by her abs. Halfway up she extends her legs and leans back to execute an “A layout,” throwing in a few sit-ups for good measure. It’s awe-inspiring, and yet Evans watches final cut and sees feet that should have been pointed, even in Mercedes’ red platform stilettos.

Courtesy Evans

“The dancer in me really wanted another take,” she says.

After the pilot, Katori Hall, the playwright who created the series, specifically told the actresses not to lose weight—she liked their bodies as is. “That’s unlike any other job I’ve ever had,” Evans says. Not worrying about how her body looks to her has been freeing, and inspiring.

“I’m actually doing this for me now,” she says. “It feels good.”

Starz announced late last month that “P-Valley” will be renewed for Season 2, though the pandemic has delayed production. In the meantime, Evans has been rotating through a series of online cardio dance and strength classes, and occasionally leading workouts for her followers on a private Facebook group.

“I’m preparing my body now,” she says. “Everybody knows that flexibility does not come back overnight.”

Chief among her concerns: doing splits, maintaining core and back strength. There’s no pole at her house, but just like that teenage girl who didn’t have a ballet barre in her basement, Evans is setting her goals high, and grateful for a chance to achieve them.

The post “P-Valley” Star Brandee Evans Brings Legit Dance Chops to the Show appeared first on Dance Magazine.

These Two New Dance-Filled Flicks Are Getting Us Into the Holiday Spirit

Who couldn’t use a little extra holiday cheer this year? Netflix is stepping in with a double dose of heartwarming, dance-powered programs this November that celebrate the season.

Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey

First up is movie-musical Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, dropping November 13. This new family flick is a fantastical journey, following a toymaker and his family through the generations. Though that might sound like standard holiday-magic fare, Jingle Jangle isn’t just another Christmas movie. It features a majority Black leading cast dropped into a semi-steampunk, Victorian setting.

And it wouldn’t be a musical without some seriously infectious dance scenes, courtesy Ashley Wallen, who lent his choreographic talents to box-office juggernaut The Greatest Showman. The cast is stocked with familiar faces, including Forest Whitaker, Keegan-Michael Key, Anika Noni Rose, Phylicia Rashad and Ricky Martin, and the original soundtrack features pop-powered tunes by John Legend, Philip Lawrence and Davy Nathan.

Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker

On November 27, Netflix premieres Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker. The documentary, from Shondaland—producer of hits like “Grey’s Anatomy” and “How to Get Away with Murder”—goes behind the scenes of Debbie Allen‘s twist on the holiday ballet. Her annual youth production is an energized remix of The Nutcracker, featuring hip hop, jazz, tap, ballet and other genres.

Though Dance Dreams features footage of the popular production, its focus is the sweat equity that gets the students—many of whom return year after year—to the stage. Step into auditions and the rigorous rehearsal process at Debbie Allen Dance Academy, and you’re sure to be inspired. In the trailer, Allen asks her dancers: “Where are you trying to go in life? Every day is not just a rehearsal for Nutcracker. It’s a rehearsal for the rest of your life.”

Join
Dance Magazine in celebrating Debbie Allen at the December 7 virtual Dance Magazine Awards ceremony. Tickets are now available here.

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Exclusion Is Oppression: From Pedagogy to Performance

Colonialism and slavery violently disrupted the histories of Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC). White folks appointed themselves tellers of all stories, and their viewpoints have rewritten, erased or entirely excluded other narratives. BIPOC dance artists have, for long, felt this exclusion while being exploited. This exclusion is still the source of trauma for many BIPOC artists in 2020. Recent online posts address it, Black educators teach it and Black dancers experience it. Still, dance organizations continue to use Black culture and contributions to their own benefit, while deleting the Black artists themselves—from pedagogy to performance.

Dance Education Rooted in Oppression

In my own dance education, dance was taught to me through a reduced lens—a narrow lens. I was taught a lie; that ballet was the foundation of all dance forms. Not true… far from it. What was true is that ballet, a Eurocentric dance form, was created from whiteness and has never ceased to be exclusionary.

Recently, I had a phone conversation with two Black male colleagues who are educators and performers. We talked about how similar our graduate school experiences were: the centering of whiteness in the curriculum, the feeling of isolation as you navigated the spaces you came in contact with and the politics of erasure. Michael Medcalf, now an assistant professor of dance at University of Memphis, spoke of the dance history course he took in graduate school as “challenging.” He expressed that the class touched on the biographies of Donald McKayle (1930–2018), Alvin Ailey (1931–1989), Pearl Primus (1919–1994), Katherine Dunham (1909–2006), with a sprinkling introduction of Asadata Dafora (1890–1965). However, Medcalf acknowledged that he and his cohort mostly unpacked ballets like Swan Lake and Giselle to study feminist theory through the male gaze and debated the beginnings of American Modern Dance through Duncan, Shawn, Holm and other white artists. Medcalf noted there was no critical discourse on the historical contributions of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (1878–1949), John W. Bubbles (1902–1986), Charles “Honi” Coles (1911–1992) and Charles “Cholly” Atkins (1913–2003), Fayard Nicholas (1914–2006) and Harold Nicholas (1921–2000), or Janet Collins (1917–2003). He remembered the void in Black representation when his professor and classmates discussed the Judson Church era, wondering, “Where were all the Black folks?”

This experience compelled Medcalf to help reshape the dance curriculum at Alabama State University during his tenure there from 2013–2018. He, along with his colleagues, knew that the fullness of dance history could not be taught in one semester, so they developed a two-semester course that spanned the Baroque period to contemporary hip hop, while remaining mindful of who gets omitted versus admitted. He was intentional about including Talley Beatty, Josephine Baker and Dianne McIntyre. He also taught about Joan Myers Brown, Cleo Parker Robinson, Lula Washington, Ann Williams and Jeraldyne Blunden, whom he emphatically labeled “the fabulous five.” He said, “We must be careful when talking about an individual’s contribution to dance history,” adding, “it suggests that they lie on the periphery instead of embedded within.” He then categorically stated, “There is no dance history without Black history.”

Exclusion in academic realms can come from unexpected places. Iquail Shaheed, assistant professor of dance at Goucher College, remembered his time in graduate school at SUNY Purchase, where he studied choreography and composition, saying “My dance composition teacher and coach, a Japanese dancer and educator, was paradoxical in her pedagogy. Although she was not white, she encouraged white principles in dance composition practices. This teacher would push me to find my voice in the subject of Blackness. Unfortunately, my explorations had to fit within the confines of whiteness or they were never received as good choreography.”

Black Dance Forms Minus the Black Dancer: An Oppressive Act of Exclusion

When Black dancers tell their stories, they spill truths about being tokenized. We are asked to perform our Blackness in ways either passively violent or acutely racist. I have had white choreographers say to me “I know you have rhythm, you’re Black!” when offering a correction about musicality. I’ve also had white dance teachers say “Do what you would do when you dance with your Black friends,” as a prompt for a movement- improvisation exercise. As if me being present in my already full Blackness wasn’t enough.

It is no secret that in most university dance programs, ballet and modern are academic necessities, and that African diasporic forms are electives, rarely offered or required. Now a professor myself at Kent State University, I look to other Black dance scholars like Dr. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Dr. Takiyah Nur Amin, Dr. Raquel Monroe, Dr. Nyama McCarthy-Brown and Dr. Thomas DeFrantz, who have long been theorizing about the Black body, reminding us of ways it has been excluded from academic and performing spaces.

In Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, Dixon-Gottschild reminds us that we don’t have to look far to see the Africanist legacy in ballet, that it comes bursting through several of George Balanchine’s ballets, from Apollo (1928) up through Symphony in Three Movements (1972). She critiques elements in his movement vocabulary for Agon (1957)—naming “the displacement and articulation of the hips, chest, pelvis and shoulders, instead of the vertical alignment of the torso, and attacking the beat, instead of carefully placed extensions”—as Africanist components. Holding a mirror up to Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments (1946), and the historically Black Lindy hop, Dixon-Gottschild points out the way “the female is helped into the air by the male dancer who bumps her buttocks with his knee.” Dixon-Gottschild affirms that the Lindy version is “faster, more explicit, and more dynamic, but the lift is the same, in principle.” And she isn’t the only scholar who speaks of such appropriation and erasure. In Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism, the late Sally Banes also notes Balanchine’s use of African-American movement vocabulary. Why, then, are there so few Black dancers in New York City Ballet’s history?

Misty Copeland’s
promotion to become the first Black female principal at American Ballet Theatre was yet another public acknowledgment of a first in the contributions of Blacks to dance—Misty, we see you. But when we are the first or the only one, our presence can be mere window-dressing, a visible gesture at inclusion that only highlights the institution’s historic exclusion.

I remember a conversation I once had with Rod Harrelson, the single Black male dancer swing on the national tour of Swing!—a dance-based Broadway hit from 1999 to 2001. He wondered why there weren’t more Blacks and people of color to cover ensemble roles. This was ironic because swing is a dance genre that originated in the African-American community in the 1920s and ’30s, with music by Black musicians, until white musical artists like Benny Goodman and the Dorsey Brothers disseminated the form to a white mainstream audience.

White America continues to guzzle up Black culture, rejecting those from which the culture came—a conscious act that is usually framed and explained away with language that pacifies. One example is believing that Miley Cyrus is to be thanked for the genesis of twerking because of her feeble attempt at the MTV Video Music Awards in 2013. The truth is, twerking can be traced back to as early as 1820 and continues to be performed in many African countries as a celebratory gesture of honor. It is neither new nor white. And within the African context, definitely not sexualized. The complex effects of appropriating cultures stunt the advancement of policies around inclusion and equity.

Things to Consider as We Work Towards Inclusion

In the wake of recent cultural, social and political actions, dance has begun a long overdue reckoning as artists demand that considerations of equity and inclusion be placed at the center of hiring, promoting, casting and programming practices. The damage of omitting Black narratives and excluding Black dancing bodies is evident as more Black and brown dance artists come
forward to share their experiences. This year, dancers George Sanders, formerly of Ballet Memphis; Nicholas Rose, formerly of National Ballet of Canada; and Felipe Domingos, formerly of Finnish National Ballet, all took to
Instagram to publicly voice their positions on how their respective companies have been complicit in anti-Blackness. Hearing personal stories in these public outcries makes the extent of the damage more easily understood.

The truth is, omitting and excluding Black bodies from the screen, the stage, the studio, the front of the lecture hall and leadership positions in dance companies impacts how the field advances and how systems of oppression reign. Mis- and underrepresentation perpetuates negative social understandings, biased standards and racist points of view. The Black dancing body is a place where history also lives: This body should be present in all spaces where dance happens, where dance is studied, where dance is supported and promoted—if we are serious about truly changing and broadening what we value moving forward, we must prepare those spaces for them. We must also:

• Acknowledge the Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian lands on which you may stand and perform. Additionally, acknowledge their native peoples.

• Alter dress codes and hairstyles that negatively impact BIPOC.

• Hire, cast and promote dancers based on talent rather than “look” or “fit.”

• Remember that Black dancing bodies were in existence before Louis XIV and Isadora Duncan, when teaching dancing history. And if your pushback is that the curriculum addresses ballet and American modern dance, then ask yourself why.

• Know that to fully include the richness of Black experiences into your organizations and schools, you must address whiteness.

• Embrace, and cite, Black culture.

The post Exclusion Is Oppression: From Pedagogy to Performance appeared first on Dance Magazine.

My Life as an Invisible Black Choreographer

The day I fell in love with ballet was the day I signed myself up for what now seems like a life of invisibility.

Despite clear talent, I grew up with teachers who ignored me in class; it made me work harder. I went on to a performance career with Oakland Ballet, North Carolina Dance Theatre and BalletX, among others, despite being ignored by some directors who seemed to have hired me simply to check off a box. I became the visible token while feeling completely invisible.

I was named “a choreographer to watch,” by Roslyn Sulcas of The New York Times, for work I presented at The Young Choreographers Showcase in 2010. And yet, I am the only choreographer from that year’s festival never to receive a commission by a ballet company. I titled myself “The Invisible Choreographer to Watch.” I realized that if I wanted any visibility, I would have to create my own opportunities, hiring dancers and presenting my work myself. Thus Ballet Boy Productions was born. However, I believe to truly grow you need opportunities that company commissions can offer.

Jared Allan Brunson and Maxfield Haynes in Ja’ Malik’s A Love Sonnet

Julia Crawford, Courtesy Ja’ Malik

Now, 2020 is drawing to a close. And I’m fighting double duty: to stay alive as a Black man in America, and also as a Black male artist in the ballet world. A world that neither seems to have an idea who I am, nor seems to care if I’m not willing to create work with evocations of hip hop or Black culture, primarily exploiting my culture for others’ enjoyment.

I am one of the very few Black male choreographers who grew up entirely in ballet. My role models are few and far between. Dwight Rhoden and Alonzo King stand out. Like me, these two men utilize the ballet vocabulary in works that speak to the contemporary world we live in, without reducing our culture for applause. Yet, I don’t find their voices as visible as many of the leading choreographers in the ballet world today.

This invisibility in “ballet society” is becoming debilitating and costing me a deserving career, as well as a means to financially survive. It is disheartening every time I receive a rejection letter, especially when I look at the view count on YouTube and find out they didn’t even watch my work. It makes me wonder why I was rejected without consideration. When I look at the field of working ballet choreographers, heavily stacked with white men, I can’t help but think it must be race.

I’m not writing this as a plea to please hire me. I’m writing this as a plea for myself and for other Black artists to be seen!

We are out here with loud and special voices. Honing our craft for that moment we become visible. Creating works that not only speak of the Black experience, but of the human experience. An experience created differently because of who we are.

I hope by the time we are visibly being judged solely on our merit, we are alive to experience it. I hope we, as Black artists, become visible, so our stories can shine.

The post My Life as an
Invisible Black
Choreographer appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Has Social Media Changed How We Experience Dance in Public Spaces?

When choreographer Stephan Koplowitz presented Natural Acts in Artificial Water in Houston’s Gerald D. Hines Water-wall Park in 2012, he hired a professional videographer to document the performance. But when he looked over the footage, he found that one section of the piece hadn’t gotten enough coverage. “I put out a call to my cast and said, ‘Did any of your friends video this part of the piece?’ ” Koplowitz remembers. “And I got footage that I ended up using, from someone who had filmed it with either a small video camera or their iPhone.”

Today this kind of story seems unsurprising. But even a decade ago, it wasn’t as easy to capture photos and videos of dance at our fingertips, to share them with our friends, or to look up footage of the dancers we love online.

And while it’s true that you’re more likely to see people sneaking their phones out in the theater these days, this has arguably had the greatest impact on dance in public spaces—the types of performances where audiences are allowed, and sometimes even encouraged, to engage with the work through their phones.

luciana achugar’s
New Mass Dance in Times Square in 2018 Rachel Papo

Especially in the last 10 years, it’s become increasingly common to see public dance works gracing our social media feeds. You can find dance in museum galleries, in parks or outside famous buildings. In 2018, Times Square Arts partnered with Danspace Project to present three site-specific works in the heart of one of the busiest intersections in the world. Before last year’s official opening of The Shed, a new performance venue in Manhattan, the space built excitement with a free outdoor preview festival, which included a reimagined William Forsythe pas de deux and a program by flex artist Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray, among others—taking advantage of passersby’s subsequent social posts to promote the opening.

Amidst all of this, how is the work itself faring? Social media is often credited with increasing exposure for dance, or helping to engage younger audience. But is it also changing how we watch site-specific dance, or affecting what gets programmed in the first place?

It’s not unusual for notions of how audiences should behave to evolve over time, says choreographer and speaker Sydney Skybetter, who often looks at the intersection between dance and technology. And with an influx of content on social platforms, like people filming themselves dancing for TikTok, the internet has broadened the dance community and made it possible to be a performer or an audience member in many different ways.

“This is maybe another opportunity to think really carefully about what a ‘dance community’ is constituted of,” Skybetter says. “Is it constituted of institutions, or is it a constellation of creators and audiences, curators and retweeters?”

In the case of site-specific dance, that community has to choose the experience they want to have. “Whether somebody’s yelling to put the phone down or somebody can’t wait to pick the phone up, this is about meaning-making,” Skybetter says. Some studies suggest that we’re more likely to forget about an experience we’ve photographed, but there can also be joy in reliving an experience by looking through photos later. “It’s making the decision for yourself as an audience member. Which kind of experience do you want to foreground: the one in the present or the one in the future?”

Limor Tomer, general manager of MetLiveArts, has programmed artists such as Silas Farley, Andrea Miller and Monica Bill Barnes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She admits that it can be annoying to watch people viewing a performance through their screens, but she also understands the impulse to take ownership over an experience.

“It’s a little bit like ‘I was there, this is my mark, this is my version of it. It’s a personal exchange between me and the dancers,’ ” she says. “It’s the same thing that makes people sign their name on a monument.”

Koplowitz, who has been creating site-specific dance since the 1980s, first started noticing a difference when audiences began bringing small digital cameras or basic camera phones to performances. With the release of the first iPhone in 2007, the number of people viewing performances through a lens exploded.

“Sometimes I feel people are distracted or not experiencing the work as fully as possible because they’re so busy recording it or taking photographs,” he says.

Still, he points out that the unpredictability of the audience has always been part of site-specific work. “As a site artist, you have to allow what happens with an audience to happen, and you have to accept it,” he says. “On some level you want people to be standing or sitting there in rapt attention. On the other hand, we’re in the middle of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.”

A hip hop battle at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Paula Lobo, Courtesy Met Museum

Presenting dance in a public space automatically has a different set of guidelines than a traditional theater would, argues Lili Chopra, curator of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s River to River Festival, a free summer arts festival in New York City. “You know that you need to create a different type of environment, and that the work needs to let go of the necessity of a real formality that you find in the context of a theater.” she says. “So in a sense, I don’t feel that seeing people engaging with the work in different ways is a distraction. I think it’s about being able to open up the doors to so many more potential audience members, and welcoming different behaviors.”

Whether those new potential audience members will go on to buy tickets to future dance performances, Chopra isn’t sure. To her, it’s more important that social media can help dance become part of a larger conversation. “The cumulative effect of having 15,000 people post photos—that’s important,” adds Tomer. “That’s going to change the field in a good way, and it changes the way people think about dance.”

The work also takes on a life of its own online. We’re often used to thinking of dance as an ephemeral, of-the-moment art form, but in the online world, in a way, a dance performance never really ends. “Performance happens in the moment, but then it has this long tail of consumption and resharing, possible virality,” Skybetter says. “The performance happens again and again, and it doesn’t necessarily ever go away.”

This can be a good thing, in terms of spreading the work to more people, but it can also add new challenges. “There’s a lot of competition for eyeballs,” Koplowitz says. “There’s been a real democratization in terms of how people have access to it, and in a sense, the bar is higher for people to get noticed.”

Though she’s well aware of the tendency among museums to program dance with the hope of bringing in more young people, Tomer doesn’t choose work based on how it will look on Instagram. “The point of doing a performance in a gallery is not to use the gallery as a beautiful, expensive backdrop,” she says. “It’s to somehow move the scholarship forward on both the choreography and the work of art, so if that’s not happening, then it doesn’t need to happen in a gallery. It should happen at The Joyce, where you can control for lighting and have a nice stage and not break the dancers’ knees.”

Still, Tomer does find that the inevitability of a piece ending up on social media can force artists to take certain things into consideration when making it.

“I do think some choreographers are keenly aware of the fact that they’re being filmed all the time, and that affects their decisions—spatial decisions, everything from costuming to movement,” she says. During open rehearsals in public galleries at the Met, they also have to adjust to museumgoers wandering through and photographing or filming them at work—sometimes even coming up to ask questions.

Taylor Stanley in Pam Tanowitz’s
time is forever dividing itself by innumerable futures Whitney Browne, Courtesy River to River

Koplowitz points out that site-specific dance has always been used to promote certain locations, or draw people to them. When the British Library was moved to a new, unpopular location in 1998, for instance, he was commissioned to create a piece that could help attract more positive attention to the new space. “In some ways,” he says, “nothing has changed.”

We still have a lot to learn about what all this means for the future of performance. “We have the benefit of 400 years of understanding how proscenium performance has worked—the internet has only been around for a couple decades,” says Skybetter.

He sees opportunities for artists to make these new platforms work for them, rather than the other way around. “There’s a way here for choreographers and dance artists to lead, to not just respond to the zeitgeist but shape how these technologies are developed,” he says, naming examples like Kate Ladenheim, who’s experimented with augmented reality; or Larry Keigwin, one of the earliest dancemakers to explore cell phone culture in his site-specific work, even incorporating phones into some pieces. “These artists aren’t just trying to take a proscenium dance and put it on the internet, but trying to radically redefine how dance functions,” Skybetter says.

Tomer agrees, citing The New York Times‘ #SpeakingInDance series, a made-for-Instagram collection of bite-sized videos that explore various corners of the dance world. “It’s designed for social media and it’s beautiful and it works,” she says. “It’s not about documentation. It’s about creating work for that platform, which I love.”

For now, it’s still possible to enjoy both the had-to-be-there uniqueness of a live experience and its social media afterlife. Chopra points to last year’s premiere by Pam Tanowitz at River to River, in Rockefeller Park. Because the first performance got rained out, she says the dancers became even more eager to perform, creating a particularly special energy. Some people in the crowd—a mixture of die-hard dance fans and passersby—took out their phones, or wandered the park, while others stood in silent attention. The dancers, clad in green, traversed the park with their movement, sometimes finding themselves far from the audience, and other times creating an intimate atmosphere.

“It’s finding the right balance between complete chaos and yet being able to create these kinds of exquisite moments of sharing,” Chopra says.

The post Has Social Media Changed How We Experience Dance in Public Spaces? appeared first on Dance Magazine.