The Gibney Company is not your average contemporary-dance troupe. The 12 dancers, who are helmed by three directors enacting a model of lateral leadership, go by the title “artistic associate.” As full-time employees, they make a competitive 52-week-per-year salary complete with health insurance, free on-site physical therapy, an annual artistic sabbatical and paid vacation. The company is deeply committed to activism, and part of each artistic associate’s job is to do regular work with survivors of partner abuse, and to design fellowship projects aimed to fill a particular need in the community.
The goal of these efforts is to cultivate the dancers as leaders, activists and entrepreneurs—a radical step in an industry that has for so long called professional dancers “boys” and “girls.”
When Gina Gibney founded her single-choreographer pickup troupe, then named Gibney Dance Company, in 1991, she never could have imagined that 30 years later it would be doubled in size; financially secure; housed in a thriving, community-centric organization; and poised to make its Joyce Theater debut. But while many would see this as a pinnacle, Gibney thinks of it as the start of something new. “This is the beginning of a very clear, dynamic and forward-focused future,” says the founder, artistic director and CEO.
Rehearsing Alan Lucien Øyen’s premiere Shantel Prado, Courtesy Gibney
Making Space for Others
Walking around New York City, it’s easy to spot contemporary dancers by their black tote bags bearing the phrase “Making Space for Dance.” This is the longtime tagline of Gibney, the umbrella organization which houses the company as well as an ample schedule of open classes, presenting programs, training residencies, video assistance, lecture series, a digital journal and partnerships with 11 other arts organizations.
“Making Space for Dance” is also an ethos that Gibney herself has held on to since her early days as a choreographer. Just a few years after arriving in New York City from Ohio in the early 1990s, Gibney leased a permanent home for her troupe: Studio 5-2 in 890 Broadway, the historic dance building that also houses American Ballet Theatre.
“It was never just our studio, but it became a space for the dance community,” remembers Gibney. “Seeing our colleagues fill it and animate it was such a fortuitous beginning.” Though Gibney Dance now boasts 23 studios, including three performance spaces, spread across two locations, Gibney’s never stopped keeping her eye on what the field needs—even if that means stepping out of the way when necessary.
“The best thing I learned from Gina is to make an opportunity for the person beside you as you make one for yourself,” says Amy Miller, one of the company’s directors. It’s this mindset that’s allowed the company to remain flexible through so many iterations.
Until 2014, the company was dedicated to performing Gibney’s own work; for a decade this was done with an all-female ensemble. But as the organization continued to grow, Gibney knew it was time to take on a new role. She stepped away from choreography and day-to-day operations, and instituted Miller as a director. In 2017, Nigel Campbell became a director as well (both Miller and Campbell still perform with the troupe).
Today, the team works in a lateral structure: Campbell focuses on rehearsal direction, Miller spearheads the company’s community action, and Gibney oversees commissions and main-stage curation. All three believe that shared decision-making leads to more equitable choices, yet acknowledge that working together does take more time. “For me, shared leadership is a microcosm of activism in and of itself,” adds Miller.
Since transforming into a repertory company, the group has worked with dancemakers including Bobbi Jene Smith, Shannon Gillen and Shamel Pitts. “I feel like Gina is still choreographing, she’s just choreographing in real estate and in culture and in relationships,” says Miller of the shift. Gibney agrees: “Being founded as a choreographer-led company has informed everything about how our organization has grown. But during this period of rapid growth, I very intentionally let that go and turned to another chapter.”
“Like a Lightning Bolt”
Gibney refers to her original goal of directing a dance company as a small (“but important”) dream. But the intervening years have allowed her to dream on a bigger scale than she’d ever thought possible.
In January of 2020, the company received a new opportunity to do so in the form of a $2 million gift donated by philanthropist Andrew A. Davis. Gibney thinks of the gift “like a lightning bolt”: The company has since doubled in size, hiring six new dancers in the past year, including Rena Butler as a choreographic associate, and bringing in a general manager to help with the day-to-day.
This rapid growth is what’s allowing for the company’s Joyce debut, scheduled for November 2–7 and made up of three world premieres by Butler, Sonya Tayeh and Alan Lucien Øyen. The program will mark Butler’s Joyce choreographic debut and the first time that the work of Øyen, who’s based in Norway, will be seen in New York City.
“We’re excited by what the Gibney Company can do because they’re bringing in new names, which is a way for our audiences to be introduced to choreographers we might not be able to take the risk on ourselves,” says Aaron Mattocks, the Joyce Theater’s director of programming.
After a 30-year legacy performing in smaller venues, making it to the Joyce stage is a triumphant announcement to the dance world that the Gibney Company is more than just a studio ensemble. The donation is also enabling them to start touring, plans of which are still in the works.
While much has changed for the Gibney Company in the past year and a half, the troupe’s commitment to advocacy and activism has remained steadfast. Since the company’s founding, Gibney has braided work with survivors of domestic violence into her work in the studio. Today, artistic associates are trained by social workers and therapists to understand how trauma impacts the body, and how dance can be used as an intervention, in order to work in the community. They also each take on a Moving Towards Justice Fellowship, leveraging the Gibney organization’s resources to respond to the needs of the dance field. Two that currently stand out to Gibney are Jesse Obremski’s Our Paths, a multimedia online platform that cultivates leadership through empathy, and Leal Zielínska’s Okay, Let’s Unpack This, which provides free therapy and other mental health resources for dancers.
After years working for dance companies where he was asked to leave himself at the door each day, when Campbell first joined the Gibney Company as a dancer in 2015 he felt like all the disparate parts of himself were finally coming together. “I’d always loved dancing, but I knew I had something to say, and I didn’t necessarily know how to say it or have the platform to say it,” he says. “Here it’s a 360 model where we are advocates and entrepreneurs and dancers, and all of that is part of our job description.”
Dance requires a lot of focus on the self, but the outward-facing nature of the artistic associates’ roles allows for a company culture focused on radical honesty, risk taking and what Miller refers to as a “softened” sense of competition.
“This is a grand experiment, and that’s exciting to me,” adds Campbell, continuing in Gibney’s spirit of open-minded adaptability. “We don’t know what this is going to be, which means our potential is unlimited. Our work is to show up every day as a company and say yes to the possibility of what this experience has to offer to us as a company, to the field and, really, to society.”
If you hear that someone’s a burlesque performer, you might call to mind Gypsy Rose Lee’s journey from vaudeville youngster to snobby stripper in Gypsy, or even the painted ladies of Moulin Rouge! Burlesque, however, is neither. And for the growing number of women who have found their way to nightlife performance from a concert-dance background, burlesque can feel pretty close to a feminist utopia—one where women’s bodies and choreographic voices are celebrated.
Yes, stereotypes and tokenism remain an issue. But burlesque performers often find an outlet they never imagined in formal dance studios. “It really fills my cup,” says Marcy Richardson, who marries aerial dance, opera and pole dancing in her nightlife act, and also performs with the burlesque troupe Company XIV. “I get to be my most authentic self and let go of any expectations that people have.”
Burlesque’s history in the U.S. has deeper roots than modern dance or even ballet. It grew out of Victorian music hall, Victorian burlesque and minstrel shows in the second half of the 19th century. Today’s version of burlesque best resembles that of the early 1900s, when vaudeville reigned supreme. The form flourished during prohibition, and, pushed partially underground, the striptease took center stage. A wave of censorship shut down shows in the late ’30s, but burlesque came roaring back in the ’40s and ’50s, thanks to female trailblazers like Lili St. Cyr and Tempest Storm.
An entrepreneurial spirit remains firmly embedded in 21st-century burlesque. Like concert-dance choreographers, burlesquers often wear many hats: dancemaker, costume designer, self-promoter, makeup artist. “Generally, we’re independent artists,” says Jeez Loueez, a New Orleans–based burlesque performer who started out in musical theater. “It’s up to you to seek out the jobs—and get your own rehearsal space, edit your own music and design your own costumes.”
One of the most rewarding differences from a formal dance career is how often you get to perform, says burlesquer Dirty Martini. Burlesque acts translate well to myriad venues with the capacity to pull together a show quickly. “When you’re rehearsing for a contemporary-dance work, it takes, what, six months to get a concert together, and maybe you can perform for one weekend,” says Martini. “In nightlife, there are shows four or five times a week. You can take an idea you have, and in a week it’s onstage.”
The need to constantly market yourself in order to generate an audience and a loyal following feels similarly exhausting to the hustle demanded of independent contemporary choreographers, however. For most of Loueez’s burlesque career, she’s had to get enough butts in seats to turn a profit for herself. “Say there’s a bar that wants to have a burlesque show,” she says. “You might reach out to a producer, who’ll say, ‘Great. It’ll cost me $2,000 to produce this event.’ Now you have to sell tickets and match that cost before getting a cut of the door.” Loueez likes to joke that if she worked at Walgreens, she wouldn’t need to constantly post on social media that everyone should come visit her at a certain time. “I wish I could just go to work without having to shout about it every day on social media.”
Despite burlesque’s hustle culture, the transition into nightlife for most dancers-turned-burlesque-performers feels like taking a big gulp of fresh air. “Before burlesque, I would go to auditions, and I could see that I was a better dancer, but I wasn’t getting the job because I looked a certain way or I wasn’t the right height,” says Michelle L’amour, known colloquially as The Most Naked Woman. While she was dancing for an industrial glam-rock band, the front man, whom she was dating, asked her if she’d like to create a burlesque show as an opening act. L’amour said yes (“even though I had no idea what that was,” she says with a laugh). When she did her first striptease, she knew this was going to be her life. (And that front man is now her husband.)
For Zelia Rose, a burlesque performer who is also a swing in Australia’s production of Hamilton, the absence of needing to look or perform better than someone else is a big draw. “Sure, there’s always going to be competition,” she says, “but there’s never a sense of ‘Oh, I’m comparing myself to this person, the way my body looks.’ There’s more of a celebration of coming together.”
Burlesque offers a particular performance haven for plus-size women, who are weary of concert-dance companies that seem to uniformly hire a highly specific body type: thin. When she graduated from Purchase College—a program she says she entered on weight probation—Martini knew the odds of finding a contemporary-dance gig were small. “I auditioned for everyone, and I knew no one was going to hire me, because I was a size 14 or 16,” she says.
Zelia Rose; Richard Marz, Courtesy Rose
Carving a space for herself and helping to shape the nascent burlesque scene in New York City in the 1990s was thrilling. “It’s exciting for me to present a body that people get excited about,” says Martini, a past winner of burlesque’s version of the Olympics, the Miss Exotic World pageant. “It’s not just men being excited because it’s titillating—the majority are women who are so excited to see a body that’s not reflected in magazines or in television or the movies. They’re like, ‘Oh, thank God! Somebody’s representing the majority of women in the U.S. who are over a size 12.’ “
Of course, stereotyping still exists. “When you look at the ways shows are cast, it might be five thin white girls and a brown girl and a fat girl,” says Jezebel Express, a burlesque dancer who recently began performing out of a specially outfitted school bus. “You still see some idea that people are welcome, but only if they’re achieving at a super-high level.” It’s common for plus-size performers to feel relegated to comedic routines, Express says: “They expect to have to deflect their sexuality.”
Burlesque, like nearly every performance field, still has work to do when it comes to moving beyond tokenism and successfully integrating performers of color. “I get pigeonholed into always being the representation card,” says Rose. “I’ll often be the only POC visible in shows.”
It’s an audience-diversity issue, too, says Loueez. “Producers will ask me, ‘How do I get my audience to be more diverse?’ ” she says. “Well, you booked 10 skinny white ladies! If you’re not seeing yourself reflected onstage, you’re not going to go to those shows.”
Loueez, who 10 years ago founded Jeezy’s Juke Joint, a Black Burly Q Revue, as a way to shine a light on Black burlesque performers, uses her teaching career as a tool for change. “I started teaching because I was tired of seeing appropriation,” she says. “A lot of people were using it for comedic effect: ‘How hilarious is it that I’m white and I’m trying to twerk!’ But if a Black burlesque performer did the same act, it would be too stripper-y or raunchy. I have to remind myself that burlesque is not a sparkly bubble where racism and ableism and classicism don’t exist.”
It is a space, performers argue, that offers a wider range of self-expression than its concert-dance counterpart—and seems more ready to tackle the problematic issues that need fixing. “We live in a culture that created a hierarchy of bodies that serve the patriarchy,” says Express. “But people are slowly hopping off the train, one at a time. And I get to help them off the train—with burlesque.”
The lurch of conflicting COVID-19 guidance has wildly shifted how we occupy space with one another. Our collective improvisation through the “coronasphere” (as scholar Kate Elswit brilliantly named it) has been subject to an onslaught of rules, reversals and regulations.
As part of a shared research project with Dr. Heidi Boisvert and Melissa Painter through the Guild of Future Architects, we spoke with a number of dancers, choreographers and scholars thinking through the ramifications of COVID on our lives, and what comes next. What we found was galvanizing and unsurprising: that dancerly folks are abundantly contributing to the reimagining of civic and cultural structures in anticipation of an eventual, post-COVID moment.
Kate Elswit, Reader in Theatre and Performance, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
“Simple respiration data doesn’t capture people’s breath experience. When the pandemic came, experiences of breath changed the extent of our bodies. People were talking about how their world was getting smaller, but actually the big issue was as you’re walking the street, as you’re walking in the grocery store, that your body was bigger. So how do we start to train ourselves to engage with that heightened feeling of breath when others are in proximity? That’s already a social choreography.”
Courtesy Elswit
Sara Wookey, Dance Artist, Researcher and Consultant
“This time has really thrown up a great opportunity to look more closely at something that is always there. It’s not just a relational practice; it’s this real ability to be in the room together with others and to create a sense of connection and belonging. Dancers have something to offer here.”
Courtesy Reiner
Silas Riener, Performer, Choreographer and Teacher
“It would be deeply comforting to seek solace and certainty in the foundations which built the work and artists of the 20th century, and the innovation of the early 21st. I feel the momentum to return, to get back, to go back, to be back. Maybe that is part of an insidious collective delusion. It’s so seductive to return to what was, but there was so much wrong. I suggest we take advantage of this moment to be aware, to be better. This is a moment of unlearning, of undoing. We are traumatized, we are brand-new little babies. We don’t know how to do anything.
“For those of us who teach and touch down in the university (and move through the reality of freelancing and making our own work), the empty promise of releasing young artists into a field we all know cannot support and employ most of them feels more hollow than ever. We rely on young artists who graduate to define the field. We hope they break the mold. We hope they find ways to live, but I worry we are not being honest about the tools we give them.
“I don’t have answers, I only have questions. Restlessness, uncertainty, unsettled-ness drive the works that feel the most important to me. So with utmost suspicion—and reverence—for the power of the past, I offer you Merce Cunningham, who said before nearly every class, ‘Let’s begin again.’”
Vanessa Chang, Senior Program Manager at Leonardo, The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology
“What does it mean to move or not move in the world? The last year has called attention to who owns place and space. It’s very important to me to attend to the specificity of location, and work that does that, and that can invite people to move through it. Artistic practice can invite a different form of moving through that sustains attention that isn’t just spectacle. I think we really need to invite reflection.”
Courtesy Chang
Teena Marie Custer, Street Dance Theater Artist in Pittsburgh
“I think there were already cultural shifts happening in how concert dance was presented even before COVID-19. The circumstances that exist now will give the concert-dance community a chance to reassess equity in terms of who and what is seen.
Courtesy Custer
“Although I feel that humans will always have a need for live interaction with an audience (I have felt this through the absence of my street/social-dance community), we have normalized watching dance virtually, from TikTok to The Joyce livestreams. After having all my touring work canceled or moved to a virtual platform, I am reassessing what skills the new generation of dancers will need to navigate the new normal.”
Jessi Stegall, Dance Artist and Graduate Student at Harvard Medical School
“During the height of the pandemic, many members of the dance community found themselves out of work, questioning the sustainability of their role as artists, and considering, perhaps for the first time, the ever-present boundaries of their work. As someone who is consistently grappling with my own duality of ‘artist’ and ‘nonartist,’ I resonate with the seemingly mass identity crisis.
“This is not an obstacle—it is an opportunity to dig deeper into values. Let’s reestablish our communal and individual values of creative making. What does it mean to flourish as a dancer? As an artist? As a human? As writer and choreographer Andrew Simonet so eloquently puts it, ‘It’s better for the world to keep your mission and change your tactics than if you lose your mission and keep making art.’”
Courtesy Stegall
Ariane Michaud, Lead Producer at The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces
“I used to find that interactions within the community existed in relation to the amount of work and play that we could get in every day. Many conversations revolved around ‘the hustle’ and the constant drive to do more, see more, be more. During COVID, artists, choreographers, producers were able to assess the imbalance that this placed on our lives and on the community as a whole. This pause did not come without hardship, however; taking a moment to reflect on the constant motion has created space to re-enter and re-create according to not only new physical standards but mental and emotional standards, as well.
“What should follow is a restructuring of the ways funding can and should support dancers, choreographers and arts administrators through this shift. The number of career pivots we are already seeing, alongside the fight to elevate the minimum wage, will affect the ways in which we gather as a community. In the current economy, it is no longer enough to do what you love.”
Ryat Yezbick, Assistant Director of the Shared Futures Program at the Guild of Future Architects
“Coming out of social isolation has felt both exhilarating and daunting; being amongst other people again has often left me feeling fatigued from a shared heightened sensitivity to ourselves and each other. To ‘catch up’ with others coming out of COVID is a somatic and emotional experience as much as it is an intellectual endeavor. The physical touch and proximity we were collectively denied, the nonverbal comforts we derive from being amongst each other, now feels like an ecstatic experience full of presence.
Courtesy Yezbick
“‘Catching up’ has therefore occurred through long-held hugs or impromptu dance parties, moments in which our bodies can collectively release all of the shared grief through the ritual of shared physical expression. How do we take this heightened presence and care for our inner worlds into all that we manifest in the future? How do we let this newfound sensitivity inform how we relate to ourselves and one another?”
Courtesy Miller
Andrea Miller, Founder and Artistic Director of GALLIM
“The threshold of the theater or museum—that’s not where art and creativity start or stop. We’re hopefully entering into a more ready climate to think about creativity and artistry without needing an invitation to enter the theater or museum. I wonder if we’re set up for it in terms of how schools teach dance. It might be a stretch. I’m really excited to see the kind of artistry and creativity that this time has invited people to value and adventure in, because I think that there’s more chances to become part of a conversation. We need strangers to dance. Strangers need you to set the conditions to dance.”
Rehearsing Sonya Tayeh’s premiere 
