ran-&-rave

The last few weeks have felt fairly routine for Ashley Bouder—morning class, rehearsal, picking up her daughter from school—until it hits her: Her 25-year career at New York City Ballet is about to come to a close.

“I go through little bouts where it’s really real and I feel like crying,” she says. “But I’m still having happy moments in the studio dancing these roles that have been part of me for decades.”

After training at Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet, Bouder came to the School of American Ballet at age 15, in 1999. She was made an apprentice with NYCB in 2000 and proceeded to ascend rapidly through the ranks, becoming a corps member that same year, a soloist in 2004, and a principal in 2005.

On February 13, Bouder will take her final bow with the company, dancing the title role in George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins’ Firebird—which was also her first principal part. Now 41, she has left the mark of her power and bravura on an impressive range of repertoire. Ahead of her retirement, she chose six memorable ballets from her career to reflect on.

Donizetti Variations, by George Balanchine

“I debuted this during my ‘falling’ era. I was so excited to be onstage that I’d jump a little too high or something, and down I’d go. Not a little ‘Oops,’ but a face-plant. When Andy [Veyette] and I ran out for the pas de deux, I fell right away. It was during a pause in the music. As I got up in the silence, I nodded at the conductor like, ‘Thanks for waiting.’

“But I just love this ballet because it’s pure joy—it’s very me. And it has my signature step, the Italian pas de chat.”

Tarantella, by George Balanchine

“I first danced this at CPYB and I was very excited about getting to shake a tambourine. I thought, ‘OMG, a prop! I am so in.’ But it was harder than I thought. It took me a while to not shake the other hand, only the tambourine. My coach, Sally [Sara Leland], would just shout ‘Left hand, stop it!’ I’d walk around my house practicing not shaking my left hand.

“The steps are funky and quirky. I tell younger people they just need to do it over and over. Once it’s in your body, it never leaves. It was always a go-to for gigs and ballet galas. It’s only six minutes, so you can just go to town with it, give it everything.”

Stars and Stripes, by George Balanchine

“I also did this at CPYB, dancing with Jonathan Stafford. Then I did it as my workshop ballet at SAB two years later. In the solo, I kept going too far in the wide-leg jumps. When Peter Martins came in to coach, he added a beat to each, so I wouldn’t do a straddle split. I laughed because that made it harder, but I kept it in the choreography all these years.”

The Sleeping Beauty, by Peter Martins, after Petipa

“This was my first full-length. I was 20 years old when I debuted. I remember sitting onstage as a corps dancer watching the Rose Adagio, thinking: I want to dance Aurora the next time this comes around. Four years later, I saw my name for a rehearsal for Sleeping Beauty, but it didn’t say which role. I came in and asked Sean Lavery what we were doing. He said, ‘You’re the Sleeping Beauty.’ I thought: Did I manifest this?

“I felt very changed after this role—I became a ballerina. You have to show her journey from the young princess, to the vision, to the regal queen. It was my first time dancing a character that full. The beginning was easiest for me to identify with at first, but over time I grew into the later parts and finally felt comfortable in the delicate solo and regality of the third act.”

Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2, by George Balanchine

“This ballet is like packing all of Sleeping Beauty into 45 minutes. There’s no story, but it requires maturity, and the coaching for this role really made a difference for me. Dick [Richard] Tanner and I could have an entire conversation about why I did a particular arabesque. Why is that step here? We really broke it down. Susie [Susan] Hendl, she didn’t like how I was coming out and opening my arms in a sous-sus. She said, ‘I want you to make me cry. It just needs more than what you’re doing.’ Somehow, I knew what she meant. After the show, she was like ‘Yes,’ and there were tears.”

Firebird, by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins

“This was my first principal role, and I was 16. I learned the role in two hours and was literally pushed out of the wing for my first entrance because I didn’t know when to come out. I didn’t get too nervous, because it felt like a runaway train: It was happening whether I freaked out or not, so best not to.

“The Firebird is a complex character. I’ve known from the beginning who she is, what drives her, but it took me years to get it right. I really grew up in this character, and I couldn’t imagine dancing anything else for my final performance.”

The post Ashley Bouder on the Ballets That Have Defined Her Career appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The funding freeze that President Trump instituted earlier this week has had ripple effects in the dance community. Choreographer Jody Sperling, whose company Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance often engages creatively with the issue of climate change, was told that the troupe had lost a major State Department grant—just before leaving for the tour that grant was supposed to fund. During Sperling’s interview with Dance Magazine, news broke that the freeze had been rescinded. As of publication, Sperling is still unsure how her situation could be affected. Here is her story.

Update: On February 1, Sperling received word from the U.S. Embassy that the grant had in fact been terminated.    
      
At 8 am on Sunday morning, I woke up to a missed call from a Washington, DC, area code. It was the day before we were to leave on tour, and I’d been planning to pack and get everything together. The message was from somebody in the State Department telling me to call them back. When I got a hold of them, I was told the $30,210 grant that was partially funding our project no longer “effectuates agency priorities,” so it was terminated, and we should cease activities immediately.

We’d been planning this tour for almost three years. The director of Hakawy International Arts Festival for Children in Egypt—which brings international artists to do really innovative programming for kids of all backgrounds—wanted Time Lapse to perform. We had secured a $12,750 grant from Mid Atlantic Arts. Then the U.S. Embassy in Cairo awarded around $30,000. Time Lapse did a fundraiser to cover the rest.

We spent months working out the programming and logistics for six shows plus workshops in three cities. Mid Atlantic Arts had already told me that we would have to give back their entire grant if we didn’t perform. We’d purchased the plane tickets. The dancers had cleared their schedules, and I had contracts with them. So I realized: It’s not going to cost us much more to go than not to go. We might as well go.

I started making phone calls. I texted anyone I could think of who might have some means or some sway. But by the time I landed in Egypt, potential funders had been inundated with emergency appeals from others who’d lost funding.

We’d already gotten a $10,000 deposit for the Embassy grant, and can document enough expenses that we won’t have to give that back. We have $10,000 in fundraising pledges so far, and a board member and another supporter have offered loans to get us through the next few months.

So whatever happens, we’re not going to go bust over this. But there are going to be a lot of people hurting financially. People are scared, wondering how they’re going to be affected. It’s really concerning—not just the chaos, but also the fear of the chaos.

At one point on Sunday, the festival director asked me, “Well, do you have another show that’s not climate-related?” They assumed, rightly or wrongly, that our project’s climate message was the reason for the termination.

Even before this, I’d had a conversation with a grant writer, because the National Endowment for the Arts deadlines are in February, and I was thinking, Boy, I wonder what’s going to change. If climate change is an integral part of your work, how do you write a proposal to an administration that is actively not wanting to draw attention to that science? I think we’re going to find that some of us are maybe more cautious about how we communicate. Others may feel emboldened to say things that they never would have said before.

I really hope that we can continue not just to survive, but to grow. Because there is power in what we do, and I think it’s time to wield that power. Sometimes it feels so small in the face of the looming storm cloud. But I also feel like it isn’t insignificant.

The post How the Federal Funding Freeze Nearly Upended Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance’s Egypt Tour appeared first on Dance Magazine.

“Dance is the art of movement, and therefore anything that is moving, breathing, growing, or feeling is part of the dance,” says Vija Vetra, a 101-year-old Latvian-born dancer, choreographer, teacher, and lecturer who first earned acclaim as an Indian classical and modern dancer in the mid-20th century. Vetra’s passion for her art has taken her around the world, and it’s just only recently that she’s begun to slow down.

Born in Riga on February 6, 1923, Vetra recalls seeing a performance of Swan Lake at age 5 and instantly falling in love. At 16, she left home to train at the Vienna Academy (now the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna), where her instructors included modern dance legend Rosalia Chladek. In Vienna, Vetra studied ballet, modern, and various character-dance styles, as well as music, anatomy, and psychology.

World War II forced Vetra to leave Austria. Because Latvia was now occupied territory, Vetra spent several years as a war refugee. She eventually immigrated to Australia, where she joined Bodenwieser Ballet, under the direction of modern dancer and choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser (a fellow émigré from Europe). Vetra later struck out on her own as an independent performer and opened her own school. She also danced in many Australian theater productions and even had her own television program, “Music and Dance,” in 1959.

It was through theater that Vetra encountered the dance style that would become her lifelong passion. “A director asked me to create an Indian dance for a play about the life of Buddha,” she says. “I’d never studied Indian dance, but I’d always been very interested in it.” Because there were no Indian classical dance masters in Australia at the time, Vetra immersed herself in the culture’s art and sculptures, carefully studying the poses. She also read the book Indian Dancing, by Ram Gopal, a London-based performer and choreographer. “I called him my ‘guru in absentia,’ ” Vetra says, adding that in a full-circle moment, she was later able to perform with Gopal and his dance company on tour.

Although she was self-taught, Vetra was so convincing that a group of Indian audience members believed her to be from their country and encouraged her to create more Indian dances. Soon, the Indian embassy took an interest in Vetra’s work; the ambassador’s patronage led to an invitation to travel to India. On what became her first of three trips, Vetra was finally able to train with a guru in person. “He was so surprised at what I already knew,” she says, “but of course I still had much to learn.”

As her knowledge and experience grew, Vetra began incorporating Indian classical dance into her own performances. She describes her shows as “East meets West”—a nod to various Indian dignitaries’ description of Vetra herself as “a bridge between East and West.” “I started each show with dances of India,” she says, “and then moved to modern dance, performing my own choreography.” It was in the East, however, where she felt most at home: “When I do Indian dance, I feel that I come back to my true self.”

While on a coast-to-coast tour of the U.S. and Canada in 1964, Vetra was offered several teaching opportunities. She decided to stay in the U.S. and soon opened her own studio in New York City. Ever eager to broaden her horizons, Vetra also trained with Martha Graham and José Limón. “I wanted to understand American modern dance,” she explains, “because the European style was quite different.”

Vetra continued to tour the world as a performer and choreographer. When Latvia regained its independence, she was able to visit home for the first time in decades. Starting in 1990, she traveled there annually to perform and teach. In 1999, she was awarded the Order of the Three Stars, Latvia’s highest civilian honor. In celebration of her 100th birthday in 2023, Vetra starred in a two-hour dance performance in Latvia. Unfortunately, health concerns rendered her unable to visit in 2024.

Within the U.S., Vetra has been on faculty, taught master classes, and given lectures at numerous colleges and universities. She was a member of the Dance Teacher’s Guild (now the American Dance Guild) and the now-defunct Congress on Research in Dance (CORD). She still teaches a weekly movement class for seniors at Westbeth Artists Housing in Manhattan’s West Village, where she’s lived and worked since 1970.

As she approaches her 102nd birthday, Vetra hopes to be remembered not only for her illustrious stage career but also for her work as an educator who helps students discover their unique artistic voices. “When I teach, I always underline the creativity within dance,” she says. “It’s important for every dancer to find a way of self-expression, rather than squeezing into the form of someone else. It’s a special delight to watch students developing and becoming. The act of becoming is beautiful.”

The post For 101-Year-Old Vija Vetra, Dance Is a Symbol of Life Itself appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The reality of a dancer’s life is often more complicated than what we imagined as young students. We must become not just powerful artists but also skilled marketers, social media managers, and self-care experts. This, coupled with the need to pay rent and buy food, can create a heavy schedule of work and art. Time management and communication, essential­ to maintaining any career, are especially important in project-based work in the arts.

But when opportunities to work in our chosen art form arise, of course our first response is to say yes.

The tendency to overcommit is complicated. As dancers, we love what we do and want to perform. We think we can do it all. We often need multiple income streams simply to make ends meet. And in our post-pandemic world, there is also a subtle fear that life opportunities will again be taken away. As a result, we may want to take on everything while we have the chance.

But we simply cannot produce our best work or stay healthy when we take on too much responsibility. This is when we’re more likely to get injured or sick. We have to rush from one project to another, risking accidents, being late, not eating.

As a dancer, artistic director of a professional dance company, and choreographer, I am frequently seeking artists for hire. I always have candid conversations with dancers at auditions and before we begin the rehearsal process. We give them contracts to sign, which include the payment details and rehearsal schedule.

Most producers understand that artists are juggling demanding schedules—schedules they often have little control over—and are willing to compromise. Still, every cast includes dancers who are simply overcommitted. “Oh, I will only miss a couple rehearsals” is a common response, or “I can learn off video.”

In our ever fast-paced lifestyle and state of global trauma, we have lost the ability to step back and ask, “Can I fulfill my job obligations?”

We often overcommit with the best intentions, trying to balance a steady paycheck with freelance dance work. In those circumstances, communicating is key. Be honest and up front with everyone, including yourself. Let the production team know of work schedule conflicts ahead of time, if and when you can.

Part of learning to say no is trusting the process. If we can’t take on a job, we need to remind ourselves that there will be other chances to dance, in a time and space when we can give our all. It can be challenging to cobble together a career from a collection of dance projects, but one of the upsides is that those projects tend to come in many different forms: long-term, short-term, minimal and longer rehearsal times. With creativity, and the support of understanding directors, we can find a good fit.

It’s not easy to square our financial and logistical realities with our artistic dreams. But approaching both our careers and each other with care and trust will help us find the right balance—allowing us to take care of our physical and mental health, and to show up for each project at our best.

Amy Jordan is a choreographer, author, coach, and speaker, and the subject of the documentary Amy’s Victory Dance.

The post Op-Ed: Should Dancers Say Yes to Every Opportunity? appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The UK’s The Spectator recently published a piece by the Japan specialist Lesley Downer, historical consultant for the Northern Ballet’s 2020 production Geisha. In her essay, Downer wonders why claims of cultural appropriation so dramatically affected the reception of the work, which has not been remounted since its premiere. You can hear her frustration as she questions the validity of negative responses from those of Asian descent—including from people like me, founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, which since 2017 has worked to improve Asian representation in ballet.

Geisha is an original fantasy created by an almost exclusively White creative team that follows two geishas who both get raped during the course of the ballet. It is the latest in a long tradition of ballets with “Oriental” characters and settings, often with the women dying tragically, but beautifully. (For examples and discussion, see Banishing Orientalism: Dancing between Exotic and Familiar.)

I don’t find it helpful to impugn the intentions of the creators of works like Geisha. However, it is essential to consider the impacts of such works on audience members, performers, and our larger society. Kudos to Downer for collaborating with Japanese experts on the story she wanted to tell. What was missing was consideration of the consequences of telling this kind of story—yet again—for today’s diverse audiences.

The Final Bow for Yellowface movement has been having such an impact partly because we’re living in a time of cultural sea change. Representations of Asians on the ballet stage have historically been defined by non-Asians. But today’s audiences are ready to move beyond Orientalism and its worn-out tropes, created by artists of European descent for audiences of European descent. We’ve begun to insist that if we want to set stories and operas in particular cultures, members of those cultures—as well as those who will be affected by its telling—should be collaborators. Someone from Asia used to living in the majority and an Asian living in the minority will likely experience Orientalist works differently. Where someone from Japan might see a funny clown (what’s the harm in that?), a British Japanese person might see a generic “Asian” caricature, made the butt of many Christmas pantos.

When living in the minority, a Japanese Brit and a mixed-race Chinese American like me can both be seen as generic Asians. And storylines that reinforce certain tropes about Asian people—the submissive and highly sexualized geisha, the geeky and effeminate sidekick with thick glasses—have real consequences for us. They range in seriousness from taunts in the schoolyard to being scapegoated and blamed for a pandemic, spat upon, and attacked. The fetishism of Asian women has resulted in actual rapes and horrific killings.

I hope that we would think twice about presenting works that feature even the most sublime choreography, the most beautiful sets and costumes, the most poignant and authentic librettos, once we understand their power to reinforce a long pattern of “othering.” Some of us do not have the luxury of enjoying a fantasy onstage without being affected in everyday life.

My recent focus has been exploring ways to layer new stories over the choreography and music of classical works—Madama Butterfly, La Bayadère—that feature cultural caricatures created by European creatives of the past (who didn’t know better!). These works are so much a part of our history. The goal is to preserve the best of our traditions without the baggage, and without harming the Asians among us.

If there is a company interested in revisiting Geisha, why not rework the libretto alongside Japanese collaborators who are aware of its possible impacts? Aren’t there stories we could tell about Japan that aren’t tragic fantasies about beautiful and sexually submissive Japanese women? In the case of Geisha, a skilled and thoughtful reworking probably wouldn’t even have to change too much of the choreography, sets, or costumes. As someone who directed an award-winning production of Madama Butterfly last year for Boston Lyric Opera, I know firsthand that it is possible for a non-Japanese person to tell an authentic geisha story that both reflects artistic intentions and meets the times.

The post Op-Ed: ​​How to Save a Doomed Geisha appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Stroll through New York City, Chicago, or Western Massachusetts in the next month and a half and you might encounter a somewhat mysterious provocation on a poster, or in a window:

“Exorcism = Liberation”

“I came here to weep”

“What is your first memory of dirt?”

Yanira Castro, the multidisciplinary artist behind those slogans, hopes you’ll be intrigued enough to scan the QR code accompanying them—and that, from there, you’ll listen to the three transportive audio experiences that compose her public art project, Exorcism = Liberation.

Conceived in response to the upcoming presidential election “as an act of intervention,” the audio pieces explore grief, climate disaster, connection to land, protest, and more. Each is deeply informed by Castro’s Puerto Rican identity. “That’s the real origin story of this project,” she says. “The place of my birth—its relationship to the United States, and its lack of self-determination.”

Castro and her team, a canary torsi, worked with mostly Puerto Rican artists on the project, which can be accessed both online and through the many posters, banners, and signs throughout the three locales Exorcism = Liberation calls home, each chosen for its significant Puerto Rican population. Castro will also be hosting “activations” in each city through early November, including dinners, performances by dancers Martita Abril and devynn emory, and a storytelling event featuring local teens.

Castro spoke about Exorcism = Liberation, and the impact she hopes the project has ahead of the election.

What is the origin story of this project?
Coming from a place where the people are colonized and don’t have access to the vote, it is important for me to be thinking about what that means, that a community gets together and makes decisions about its future. But we don’t really talk about it that way. We talk about it as an individual event—“my vote.” So this idea of communing around election time and thinking about what the community is and how we want to support one another is really critical for me.

Most people will be engaging with this project wherever they encounter it, while others will have a more collective experience at the activations. How do you imagine the work landing differently in those two settings?
I think when we attend performance, there is a temporary community coming together, and there’s something very powerful about that. The audio scores offer very simple gestures; maybe it’s opening your hands on your lap. So seeing a group do it, and being a part of a group that’s consciously doing this thing together is one kind of experience. But if you’re listening to one of the scores out in public—let’s say you’re riding a bus, and it asks you to open your hands, and then it asks you to look around and see if anybody else has their hands open. You might see people who have their hands open and wonder, Are they listening to what I’m listening to, or do they just have their hands open? But the idea is that this is a community, this is your neighbor, and you might be thinking or doing the same thing. It’s trying to make that connection.

I’m curious to hear more about your interest in exorcism. Do you see weeping—as in the slogan “I came here to weep”—as a kind of exorcism?
There’s been research done that when we have a real weep session, there is a relief and a letting go inside of our bodies that then allows us to be more open to something else. So in that way, for me, it’s an exorcism. In Puerto Rican culture and in other Latinx cultures, we have this word “sacude,” and it means cleansing. But like many problems with translation, it’s more than that. There’s a spiritual connection to that word and an exorcism connection to that word.

In Puerto Rico, right now especially, there’s a lot of tension around the American presence on the island. It’s very fraught. So this idea of expulsion is also something that’s in my mind when I’m thinking about exorcism.

How do you see this project speaking to the current election?
For me, the election is very superficial. It often sounds like, What do we need to say to get that individual voter to feel invested enough in order to vote for me?—as opposed to thinking about what we want to create for the future, or, even more importantly, a recognition that what happens in the United States affects so many people outside of the United States. We’re not asked to consider our effect on one another.

All of the materials in this project are election-type materials, like stickers and pins and lawn signs. Those are some of my favorite objects, because they’re movable, so the public can decide where this project goes. In that way, the project is being carried through time and space to others that I can’t possibly know about. The public isn’t just listening to the work, but they’re taking it out and dispersing it.

One of my favorite things is thinking about these lawn signs, right next to these election signs, and people just taking a moment to stop and have a contemplative five-minute experience, and think about how we are deeply connected, and how deeply our choices matter. What world do we want to create and live in?

The post Yanira Castro’s Exorcism = Liberation Is a Public Art Campaign for Divided Times appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Bronx-based dancer, director, and educator Kayla Hamilton is at a transitional moment in her career. Her largest ensemble project yet, How to Bend Down / How to Pick It Up—a multidisciplinary performance exploring histories of Black disability, while imagining a liberated future—premieres at New York City’s The Shed next week before embarking on a U.S. tour in 2025. She also recently launched Circle O, a cultural organization described as “by and for Black Disabled and other multiply marginalized creatives.” In addition to these firsts, Hamilton recently received several awards, including a 2024 Disability Futures Fellowship and the 2023–2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship.

Even as she gains momentum and institutional recognition, Hamilton remains deeply connected to her roots. The name Circle O honors her family in Texarkana, Texas, where her grandfather, Oscar Hamilton, was the principal of an all-Black elementary school. Hamilton only just wrapped up her own 12-year career as a public-school educator—a path she pursued in tandem with her dance work. She’s now poised to bring her powerful artistic vision to a national audience.

I imagine you’re in full production mode for How to Bend Down / How to Pick It Up.What has this process been like for you?
I’m nodding my head and my body is rocking forward and back from the hips. I’m looking out the window. I just had a visceral response to that question. The way my body is responding is the real answer.

I learned a lot about myself through this process, and I learned that the work I want to put into the world is a life practice. It’s beyond just dance, because we’re undoing ableism inside the practice. Dancers come into their training to get it right, to make it perfect, but disability is the method and the subject in this process. We’re really good at being with disability as a subject in the United States. But there’s a lack of understanding of disability as a method, too.

How does disability as a method show up in How to Bend Down?
When we ask folks for their access needs, we’re also asking for access intimacy with oneself. You don’t have to be Disabled to experience ableism. There may be parts of ourselves we let go of in order to be like others. And while you may be able to mask your needs and desires, go along to get along, where does that leave people who cannot make their access needs fade away?

I’m trying to recognize the whole person, each person as a human being. It makes it harder in process, because I’m not asking you to get the step “right” in rehearsal. I’m asking you to deepen into what your body is feeling, instead of pushing through just because that’s what the director asked you to do. You may dance differently every single day, and I’m okay with that.

Do you find that there’s tension between the approach you’re describing and the social and professional expectations to produce something that’s recognizable as a dance performance?
Yes, absolutely! How do I make it transparent that what’s happening in my process is what’s happening onstage? I’m doing this work to make space for every body to have access to dance as an art form. To accomplish that, we have to break away from ideas of mastery, beauty, and perfection.

We’re usually told that there’s only one option or one way to access something. I’m trying to provide multiple access points within a creative experiment. The audience can learn something about themselves, as well.

In the spirit of multiple access points, would you be willing to share some sensory impressions from your rehearsal process?
People sitting in circles, including our American Sign Language interpreters. You would hear someone say, “Did you drink water yet?” You would hear that repeatedly. Blue floor cushions and a fuzzy blanket. The smell of Tiger Balm. Laughter. You would hear, “Where are we starting from again?” You would hear Spanish language and Southern accents. A range of ages. COVID tests and masks. You would hear a lot of, “Huh! Oh…okay…hm…I see. So what you’re saying is…? Wait, hold up.”

I saw on your website that one of the questions Circle O poses is how to find joyful and playful expression while simultaneously holding the “crushing generational weight of systemic violence and oppression.” Are you navigating that question in How to Bend Down?
Some parts of the show are heavy, but we use humor to tackle those ideas. Can you imagine how tired I would be without humor? Intergenerational strength, Black, Disabled ancestors, and enslaved people gave me the strength to do what I do. There’s somebody around me, in my ear and heart space, whispering, “Push people.” I can’t go through life without pushing joy—otherwise I would burn out. And I’m not going anywhere, so I need to laugh and play.

What do you feel yourself rooting into, amidst all this growth and change?
I’m rooting in love. I’m rooting myself in my own growing edge of curiosity—whatever I’m asking of others, I’m also asking of myself. Dance is healing and spiritual, and I want every body to have access to that. I try to create containers in which people feel cared for, seen, and valued, so they can begin to dismantle hierarchies. Nonhierarchical structures in a rehearsal process are enough to shake the room. With freedom comes responsibility and accountability. I’m asking, “Do we want it?”

The post Kayla Hamilton on Disability as Method and Access as Artistry appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Ballet de Lorraine’s Tristan Ihne has been dancing professionally for nearly two decades. But on July 26, he gave a performance unlike any he’d done before: Along with about 200 other dancers, he danced atop a golden platform filled with water next to the Seine river in an 8-minute piece by Maud Le Pladec, as part of the Olympic Opening Ceremony in Paris.

“The best part for me was to feel the energy of the group,” he says. “Here we were together with generations mixed and training styles mixed. It was amazing.” He’d never taken part in such a large performance, or danced for such a massive global audience. “There’s nothing to compare it to,” he says.

That group energy led not only to a memorable spectacle but also to a different kind of French tradition: the threat of a strike, filed by the French performing artists’ union SFA-CGT. When the dancers began rehearsing together a few days before the ceremony, they realized the amount they were being paid for broadcast rights varied widely—from 60 to 1,600 euros. The protesting dancers also wanted traveling and housing expenses paid for. “The collective agreement specifies that if you hire someone coming from more than 40 kilometers away, they should get their expenses covered,” says Ihne, who participated in the protests. In the end, event organizers met some of the demands, and the dancers dropped their threat to strike.

Dancer Magali Brito—a performer with aerial dance troupe Compagnie Retouramont, which performed during the ceremony on the scaffolding of the Notre Dame Cathedral and with the heavy-metal band Gojira in beheaded Marie Antoinette costumes—says that while she feels for the dancers, their raise seemed relatively minor compared to bigger issues surrounding the Games. “I would have liked to have a strike about the rights of a lot of people in Paris that were completely distorted,” she says, highlighting the thousands without permanent housing who were sent out of Paris ahead of the Games.

Still, she was happy to take part in the ceremony—even if not everything went exactly to plan. For instance, Brito says she and the other dancers of Retouramont were supposed to be suspended along the walls of the building during the Gojira concert. “But after security problems, they didn’t authorize us to be hanging on the walls, so we just did some poses in the windows with costumes,” she says.

There was also the infamous rain during the ceremony, which caused major problems in particular for dancers of the Moulin Rouge, who were performing on a slick surface right at the edge of the river. “For us, it was okay because we were going to perform in the water anyway,” Ihne says. “But for other dancers, it made it more difficult—I give them even more credit.”

Brito says that for her and many of the dancers, any extra challenges were worth it to take part in a ceremony that made such a statement. “Politically, it was quite important to be able to participate in this event,” she says. “In France, we just had new elections, and it felt good to be able to take part in something showing people of every color, every body type, and every gender.”

The post A Strike Threat, Scaffolding, and Last-Minute Changes: What It Was Like Dancing in the Olympic Opening Ceremony appeared first on Dance Magazine.

For 40 years, David Dorfman has made capacious work full of heart. His 2020 piece (A) Way Out of My Body features original text, songs by Lizzy de Lise, and the rousing music of a live “house band” led by composer Sam Crawford. In a performance of the work last month in New York City’s Bryant Park, Dorfman and his wife and colleague Lisa Race danced alongside the newest generation of company members. I had a unique view of Dorfman as he waited offstage for his entrance cue. A coil of electricity, he vibrated with small pulses as he held the railings on each side of the steps, ready to burst from the chute.

He’s a little like that in an interview, as well. We spoke on Zoom recently in the leadup to his company’s performances of (A) Way Out of My Body at Jacob’s Pillow (August 3–4).

Jacob’s Pillow bills you as “being on a mission ‘to get the whole world dancing.’ ” Why is that important to you?
When you’re dancing, you’ve decided that you’re going to interact peacefully, and, for the most part, you’re going to enjoy it. When you’re dancing with another person, or folk-dancing in a big group circle, or country line-dance, or disco dance—that’s how I started—you’re concentrating on being with other people, and realizing what your body is doing. You’re not scheming power trips.

The description for a workshop based on (A) Way Out of My Body states: “In our unpredictable world, filled with daily obstacles of all kinds, how do we navigate toward positive change, resilience, and empathic behavior? Our answer is to dance through life with each other: safely and with magical risk appropriate for the occasion.” I like that phrase, “magical risk.”
Sometimes I talk about opposites being the same. Sometimes I say to choreography students, “Why don’t you now do the exact opposite approach to this idea?” One of the first things I showed my mentor, Daniel Nagrin, he said, “What a great idea! That doesn’t work right now. Go back and make it work.” He was excited about what I was working on, but it wasn’t yet communicating. How could I release something that I thought was very important in order to get to something else that was more communicative?

I think about this a lot. Also that opposites attract. It’s kind of like when something really, really, ticks us off. Many times that’s because we’re really interested in it, or we see it as a side of ourselves that maybe we don’t want to recognize. I feel that if we would recognize all of ourselves, we’d be so much more empathetic, and so much more ready to see those sides in others, instead of saying, “I don’t like that” or “I don’t want to be near that.” But really, what that means is that you don’t want to be near yourself, and that leads to a lot of violence. It’s our discomfort with ourselves. What if instead of going into relationships with one-upmanship, or the need to dominate—what if we came as a listener and a witness and a facilitator?

That would be an extraordinary thing to learn in the dance studio—or in social dancing.
I think surrender gets a really bad name because it feels like you’ve lost. But what about yielding and surrendering and being vulnerable? In social dancing, leading and following can be really gender-specific. I think there are reasons that the man shouldn’t lead all the time. I also think that the notion of following gets a bad rap. If you think of tango, it’s not about a macho dominant male and a submissive female. Tango comes from two male-identifying people dancing on the docks of Buenos Aires. It is so complex and technically challenging, the follower almost needs to be ahead of the leader. They need to be ready for anything.

What about those who feel intimidated by dancing with other people? What do you say to get them involved?
You can just be present, and to me that’s a beautiful dance. Steve Paxton, who sadly died in February, would call that the small dance: the dance your body does when you’re doing nothing. It’s like: Look at all the effort we do to relax, or the effort we do to be present, and to be still and quiet and listening.

You work with people with differing ability levels—high school and college students, professional dancers, your company, community members. Do you approach these groups differently?
I almost teach the same to anybody. Each time I do a workshop or a class, it’s like the only class that I’ll ever teach. It has to be the best hour and 15 minutes, or hour and a half, or two hours, because that’s all that exists right now.

I learn every student’s name in every class. Some people might say, “Why does he spend so much time repeating names? We could be doing dancing stuff.” I think that’s just as important as the dancing stuff. That’s where I feel that this idea of empathy, joy, and community come together. I think that it is kind of radical to make those priorities like learning names, doing a little bit of a chat, and spending time with safe touch—those can be real priorities.

What can the audience expect at Jacob’s Pillow?
The last time we did (A) Way Out of My Body at Connecticut College, it was very cathartic. One of the things I did was to have everyone in the audience introduce themselves to someone they hadn’t met and also to say “I see you.” This was after the show, after, hopefully, a lot of what we had done washed over everyone.

I really enjoyed that moment. Sometimes I wonder, is it too much? Should I do that? But usually I do it. I was in our backyard the very next day and our neighbor was outside with his young baby, and he said, “David, I see you.” I said, “What?” I knew he wasn’t at the show. He said, “You were the subject of the sermon at church this morning.” Then it made sense. Because there’s this wonderful pastor who is a total arts supporter, and we’ve had many conversations over the years. But I didn’t know my neighbor went to her church.

I’m always saying it’s great to convene in the theater—that it’s like a church, or a temple, or a mosque. And it’s even greater when that spreads out beyond those walls.

The post Choreographer David Dorfman on Magical Risk and Radical Empathy appeared first on Dance Magazine.

When I first imagined choreographing a dance about the connection between the Grand Canyon and how humans explore the solar system, I figured the idea was a little too “out there” to be taken seriously. And yet, last month, I stood at the rim of the Grand Canyon as the park’s official Astronomer in Residence. Perched on a ledge of Kaibab limestone, I began the first gesture phrase that would describe the canyon’s geologic history—and form the backbone for Chasing Canyons, a modern dance solo I premiered at the Grand Canyon’s South Rim on February 23, 2024.

I’m a trained dancer and choreographer, but I’m also a planetary scientist and impact physicist, which means I study the geologic features that get created when an object from space hits a planet. There are other canyons across the solar system, from Mars to Pluto, that are wider, longer, or deeper than the Grand Canyon, but none of them match its sheer power in the human consciousness. Over the month of February, I used my dual backgrounds as a dancer and planetary geologist to choreograph a piece about the emotional and geologic connections between our world and those beyond. My goal? To blend art and science into a singular experience for and about the Grand Canyon.

As someone who actively practices both art and science, I firmly reject the dichotomy we’ve built to separate them. I became a scientist to try to understand my place in the history of the Earth, the solar system, and the universe. I became a dancer and choreographer for those same reasons. The planets are always in motion, and so are we; to me, physically embodying the planets’ orbital dynamics, geologic histories, births, and deaths, is just as valid an approach for connecting with them as gazing through a telescope.

As we think about moving on to the moon and Mars, dancing can help us consider the kinds of futures we’re building. When I dance the canyon, I center my wonder at the scale of what I’ve seen, rather than the ways in which my knowledge of the canyon can be used and commodified. I will always be chasing canyons, but I should never, ever, try to own them.

In making Chasing Canyons, I set out to choreograph a site-specific dance for a site so big it is impossible to see in its entirety. I began with my geologic knowledge of the Grand Canyon, built from my years of scientific training and the weeks I spent climbing up and down its walls. The resulting gesture phrase follows the canyon’s life cycle: the initial crush of its basement rocks, the tilting of overlying strata, the massive gap in time known as the Great Unconformity, subsequent deposition of layers upon layers of sediments, and, finally, the coming of the Colorado River to uncover it all. From there, I began to draw the parts of the canyon that I could see, tracing the terraces and side canyons, dragging feet and fingers from the tops of the cliffs to the shady hollows at the base. I worked in the positions of the stars above the canyon, which mark its location in space and time. Then I merged it all together to create a moving map, not just of the canyon, but of how humans relate to it.

Connecting the canyon to the stars raised more questions: How do we interact with beautiful spaces, here on Earth and elsewhere? When we land on Mars, will we be owners or caretakers? At the end of the piece, I answer these questions: I erase the map. Much like art and science, I think that “to boldly go” and “take only pictures, leave only footprints” are two complementary, not conflicting, philosophies.

My time as the Astronomer (and dancer) in Residence at the canyon has ended, but I will carry it in my body as well as my mind. It is my greatest hope that in making these kinds of dances, I can inspire audiences to expand their minds—to explore the different ways we can understand, learn, and appreciate the universe in which we live.

The post Dancing Across the Solar System as the Grand Canyon’s Astronomer in Residence appeared first on Dance Magazine.