ran-&-rave

You know the clichéd question: If you could go back in time and tell your younger self one thing, what would it be? At the moment, I would very much like to go back eight months in time and beg that naive version of myself to meet with a physical therapist before diving back into rigorous training. Maybe then I wouldn’t be dealing with an annoying (albeit relatively minor) toe injury that’s stalling some of my progress.

Alas, time travel has not been mastered just yet, and all I can do is share my experience with you. Hopefully you will all be wiser than me and return to your training (or continue it) hiccup-free.

The Situation

Back in October 2021, I started to feel a bit of irritation in my right big toe while on relevé. I only really noticed it while doing left en dehors pirouettes, balancing on my right foot or dancing in my LaDuca heels—and even then, it didn’t bother me too much. So I decided I’d write it off as a normal ache and pain that would go away on its own.

Spoiler alert: It did not go away on its own.

Fast-forward to February 2022: I began taking full ballet classes in my pointe shoes and finished each class with throbbing pain. My podiatrist took an X-ray and determined that the toe isn’t fractured (phew!), but thought that I might have tendinitis. Ice, rest and a cortisone shot did nothing to improve my pain, and he finally recommended that I see a physical therapist. Cue Heidi Green, the magical unicorn therapist in New York City who specializes in dancers. (She even worked as the therapist on the Lion King tour at one point!)

The Diagnosis

It didn’t take much time in Heidi’s office before she knew two things: One, there were many funky things happening in my body that she thought were contributing to my injury; and two, she wanted me to take some time off from relevé and jumps. Ugh.

When I asked her if I could have done anything differently to prevent this she said, “If someone is returning to dance after a long break, it is definitely ideal to get a screening or an evaluation by a PT to detect any potential imbalances or precursors to injury.” Of course, that won’t be financially realistic for many people—frankly, I would have put myself in that camp. But I got injured and was forced to go to PT anyway, so I suppose it’s sixes in the end.

The second thing we all know I could have done differently? Say it with me now!

“GET TREATMENT AS SOON AS YOU FEEL UNUSUAL PAIN! WAITING FOR CARE ONLY EXTENDS THE RECOVERY PROCESS AND MAKES YOU FEEL SAD!”

The Treatment Plan

Though Heidi thinks it’s possible that I have tendinitis, she also thinks there are likely a variety of problems that could be contributing to the problem. Therefore, she is looking at my body holistically and recommending treatments that go beyond my right foot.

Once a week for the foreseeable future, Heidi wants me to go into her office for a variety of assessments and treatments, including soft-tissue mobilization, joint mobilization, asymmetry corrections and strength training. “Anywhere up the chain of that leg that’s injured, I’m working to correct those asymmetries,” she says.

Between visits, she gives me homework. So far that includes massage, TheraBand foot exercises, weightless relevés (I sit in a chair with my feet on the ground and a ball between my knees while I raise and lower my heels), clamshells (an exercise where you lie on your side in the fetal position and open and close your top leg) and icing my toe.

The Bad News

Heidi doesn’t want me jumping until my toe feels better. Which makes me spiral into an everlasting pit of darkness because I’ve already spent 10 years off of dancing, and any additional time feels like an eternity. Too much? All right, I will tone down the drama.

Hopefully, addressing and treating the challenges within my entire body will make me a stronger dancer as well as help heal my toe, and it will all be worth it in the end. Everything happens for a reason, right? Man, I hope so!

The post Begin Again: Injuries—Gosh Dang It! appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Why do I dance? I never really asked myself that question. My initial love for dance was visceral and complete; when I started as a teenager, my brain and body had found an activity that could consume my thoughts and my schedule, and I accepted that with joy. At 17, when I moved to New York City to pursue a career in dance, it became my professional identity and my purpose.

But the pandemic put so many roadblocks on that life. Locked down in my apartment, I couldn’t tap dance (too loud), and I couldn’t swing dance (no partner). There were no social dances to attend, no in-person classes to teach or take, and there certainly were no gigs that obligated me to “be” a dancer. There were very few occasions where I even felt like dancing, and so, for the first time, I didn’t.

I did other things: I played piano. I biked around New York City. I read 30 books that had sat in my home for years. I was surprised to feel satisfied by these dance-less days. Without dance, I still felt like me.

But when the world “reopened,” I returned to my usual routine of performances, dance festivals and work meetings. I was ready to do something, and work (miraculously) came back. I was eager to reconnect with my chosen family of artistic collaborators, and I was excited to become, again, a dancer.

But something has changed. I feel different—I don’t feel like the dance-obsessed pre-pandemic version of myself. My new self loves dance, but my new self also loves biking, reading and playing piano.

My first ballet teacher said to me, “Dance is a sickness of sorts. It’s not something you choose to do; it’s something you must do.” I used to agree. But now, it feels like something I choose to do, and I like that.

The decision to dance has been, and continues to be, so good for me. I’m glad I have dance; it’s the constant. It’s the lens through which I experience everything else. It’s simply the most interesting thing I’ve ever chosen to do.

The post Caleb Teicher on Choosing Dance After the Pandemic appeared first on Dance Magazine.

For Jody Gottfried Arnhold, dance and dance education are one and the same. The visionary philanthropist has spent her career dedicated to transforming the lives of New York City’s public school students through dance; first as a teacher, and then as the founder of the 92nd Street Y’s Dance Education Laboratory, a program designed to train the next generation of dance educators. And Arnhold’s reach doesn’t stop there. She’s the executive producer of the 2015 documentary PS DANCE!: Dance Education in Public Schools, she works closely with the New York City Department of Education, and she’s the supporting force behind the Arnhold Graduate Dance Education Program at Hunter College and the doctorate in dance education at Teachers College Columbia University.

Her Path to Educator:

“I was always a teacher. I was the oldest of four; I taught my siblings, I taught the kids in the neighborhood, and when I was 15 I had the keys to my teacher Erika Thimey’s studio to open it on Saturday mornings and teach the 5-year-olds. I came to New York after college to dance, and I needed a job, which led me to being a classroom teacher.”

Dance Equals Education:

“I’ve come to the point where I just really don’t want to hear dance without hearing dance education—they go together, and can’t be separated. Any dancer who doesn’t think about where they came from, and how they became who they are without thinking about their responsibility to the next generation, I think has missed an opportunity for personal growth.”

On Arts Education:

“We need systemic change to institutionalize arts education. There’s still writing that says “Music and the Arts”; that’s not right. Arts education is, in alphabetical order: dance, media arts, music, theater, visual arts. So I’d like to see everywhere people say “The Arts,” and start with dance.”

The Similarities:

“Dance has historically been overlooked, but if you look at it, dance and education have the same agenda: cooperation, community, problem solving, individual voice—all those important things.”

Teachers College Columbia University:

“The doctoral program at Teachers College is a pathway for people who are interested in developing themselves as leaders in the field, and taking it to the highest level, whether it’s K–12 or higher education or working in departments of education. Those people and others like them are going to be the ones that solidify this work and bring it forward.”

Her Purpose:

“I have a goal: dance for every child. And that means dance education in every public school. I started by creating the Dance Education Laboratory and that led to working with the Department of Education to educate teachers, and then there weren’t enough teachers, so Hunter College started the Masters of Dance Education. And then we needed the leadership, so the Teachers College doctoral program. I don’t know what will be next.”

Looking Back:

“Looking back, it looks like I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t have any idea. I was just lucky enough to always know what to do next. And I’m always looking for a big idea.”

The post Jody Gottfried Arnhold Has Devoted Her Career–And Philanthropy–to Bringing Dance to Everyone appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Most of my life in dance has taken place in the studio. Wait, that’s not right. My life in dance—as a choreographer, a dancer, a director, a collaborator, a watcher—happens almost everywhere, anywhere, most of the time. Dance is the way I digest what the world is teaching me. It’s the way I traverse the intersection of “What does this feel like?” and “What makes that particular space between people so…particular?” with “How does this move?” There’s a geometry at work as I’m noticing the dynamics of energy­ and timing and personality all around me. People move. They carry a kind of story-ness in how their bodies bend around each other on the street, in their homes, between breaths. And now in my life as a choreographer and an older dancer, the chance to shape the flow of these intersecting sensations—to music, to humming along, to silence, alone, with favorite and/or new partners—is immensely satisfying.

Biggest change from the early years: less worry, more enjoyment. Hold up! Also not quite right. Though of course, yes, I worry less about how a work will come together. (There’s a lot to be said about faith in strategies that have worked before, even when the content is new.) And, yes, dancing in the last few years has been deeply satisfying even as my physical range has shifted. But my physical interest has also shifted. There is so much, still, to feel! So much to notice in the intricacies of timing and rhythm through one’s body. So much to respond to, whether you’re performing or figuring out what a specific sequence might involve. Or just dancing.

I love dancing; always have, always will. We get to be fully available, fully transcendent, deep in memory as well as the now. We get to share all of this in performance, and, when we’re lucky, we get to embody it all in the present moment, wherever we may be.

The post For Bebe Miller, Dance Is How She Understands the World appeared first on Dance Magazine.

“Watch your thumbs,” the ballet teacher said, and I looked toward my left thumb, held in second position. After a few seconds I realized what she actually meant was to tuck my thumb into my palm. I tend to take things literally.

I was diagnosed with autism a few months ago, at age 25, but I’ve been autistic my whole life. In many ways ballet class has been a safe place for me, even before I knew why I craved routine, envi­ronments with explicit rules, and social situations that don’t necessitate talking.

Ballet class’ standardized structure offered me stability as I learned the art form, starting at age 12. Autistic brains don’t automatically filter out unimportant information, rendering routine critical. Parts of my day need to be familiar if I’m taking in every sound outside my window, every leaf on the sidewalk, the way my curls feel different on my head each morning. Because the order of ballet class is consistent, I’m better able to process new information, including combinations and corrections.

Parts of class even helped my social development. Most social settings come with a high number of implied rules that can feel elusive and ever-changing to autistic people. During adolescence, I’d intuit that I’d broken a social rule but be unsure of what my mistake was. In ballet, the rules were stated directly. Once, some girls were standing in front of my teacher while she taught a combination, and she told them, “The student stands behind the teacher when they’re teaching.” Her specificity was clarifying. These explicit ballet-etiquette lessons set me up for greater success in the studio.

Because class resembles parallel play—a stage of social development when children prefer to play independently beside each other rather than interactively—it also provided me with fulfillment that I struggled to find in unstructured environments, like hanging out with friends. Autistic people can find parallel play rewarding into adulthood, unlike many of their allistic (non-autistic) peers. During the pandemic, my roommate took virtual ballet classes and, with little else to do, I started taking them beside her. I realized­ ballet is a way to feel close without language—to feel part of a community without having to navigate complex social interactions.

Along with the ways ballet has enriched my life, however, there are plenty of elements of studio culture that alienate autistic dancers. Before my diagnosis, I internalized shame about how my brain and body work, because many assumptions made during ballet class didn’t apply to me—that people swing their arms in opposition to their legs while walking, for example, which I don’t. Growing up, one of my studios banned skirts because students would fidget with them. Autistic people (and other groups, like people with ADHD) need to “stim” to regulate themselves physically and emotionally. “Stim” is short for “self-stimulatory behavior” and can include things like rocking, hand flapping and other repetitive motions. While correcting extraneous movement during dancing is justifiable, criticizing a student for fiddling with their skirt while waiting to go across the floor is unnecessary. When I let myself stim during ballet class, I learn combinations more quickly and can better regulate my emotions. While some teachers may argue this doesn’t prepare dancers for the professional world, I believe that the professional world should make reasonable changes to become more inclusive.

Ballet also comes with a host of sensory stimuli—unique fabrics, hairspray-filled dressing rooms, loud music—that can be a nightmare for autistic dancers. Sensory issues, which are unique to each individual’s nervous system, can register as physical pain and aren’t merely dislike. For example, my childhood studio’s dress code required a specific make of leotard, and the sensation of the sleeves on my skin sometimes triggered sensory overload. When a dancer complains about uniforms, costumes or music, I encourage teachers to investigate the reason. Whether it is a sensory issue, a body-image issue or something else, a nonjudgmental and open conversation will get closer to the heart of the problem.

Unaddressed sensory processing difficulties can even have dangerous effects in the long term. For most of my life, I’ve had hip discomfort while dancing that I thought was just related to muscle engagement. However, I recently learned the sensation is a chronic injury. Autistic people struggle with interoception: the perception of sensations inside one’s body. It’s hard for me to differentiate between soreness, pain and engagement. I’ve started seeing a physical therapist who helps me identify the differences, but talking about pain identification is a conversation teachers should have with all of their students.

Changes like these will include not only dancers who have requested accommodations but also those who may not know their disabilities or have the language to ask for what they need. Autistic women and people of color are much less likely to be formally diagnosed with autism as children, or ever, because of gender and racial disparities in research and bias in the diagnostic process. Each individual’s needs are unique, and there will never be a one-size-fits-all accommodation. But the first step to making sure everybody feels safe and included in a classroom is to value dancers’ autonomy. Allow input from students when solving problems; ask before touching a student and respect their answer; when a dancer expresses a need, consider creative solutions to meet it.

It would have helped me to have conversations about why certain rules existed. Discussing the reasoning for uniforms might have given me permission to approach a teacher and explain why it was difficult for me to wear the class leotard. But in my experience, the only talk of uniforms was dancers being reprimanded for not wearing them, which made me afraid to ever mention my discomfort. As Keith Lee, director of diversity and inclusion at Charlottesville Ballet, put it in a conversation with me: “Don’t discourage the artist. Take notice and act on their discovery. Their honesty, approach and involvement is their contribution to the art.”

After seriously considering a career in dance as a senior in high school, I decided not to pursue one because of the parts of dance institutions that ostracized me. I feel unwelcome in the art form when I see companies and studios perform for autistic audiences while failing to accommodate autistic dancers in their classrooms. Still, I continue to love ballet, and I regularly take classes from teachers who are patient, respectful of my needs and nonjudgmental of my differences. I hope that all autistic dancers can find teachers who celebrate them and that, as time goes on, more of us find safe and welcoming places in the field.

The post Ballet Could Be a Home for Autistic Dancers Like Me appeared first on Dance Magazine.

As a Black girl from the inner city of Baltimore, I hadn’t known anything about the codified world of dance growing up. Ballet was something I had only seen on TV—and who I saw in it never looked like me. I never thought that would be my future.

My first introduction to dance was at my audition for the Baltimore School for the Arts, and from there a love bloomed. It didn’t happen on the first day; it grew gradually, up until that one class where I was finally able to successfully execute a combination that we had been working on for a month—something that, at first, I didn’t fully believe I could accomplish. The recognition came from my teacher, but the real reward was for myself. That confidence brought about a self-awakening. Dance made me believe that I could achieve anything.

Fast-forward a year, and I met someone who turned what I thought about the world of dance upside down: Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell. At that time, she was a principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. After seeing her, I made a mental checklist: Black girl from Baltimore. Check. Performing in front of thousands of people around the world. Check. Getting paid to dance. Check. People accepting and being inspired by her artistry. Check. There were no more excuses for me to not take this dance thing seriously.

Once I made up my mind that it was possible to have a professional relationship with dance, my life changed. Dance taught me so much: Respect for my body, commitment, freedom of self, a strong work ethic, self-reflection. It taught me to love myself not “flaws and all,” but completely and uniquely for who I am. There is only one me, my story is different, and in this world I can be rewarded for it. I am a beautiful, Black girl from Baltimore and also a principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Representation matters.

The post Ailey’s Jacqueline Green on Representation in Dance appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The pandemic has contributed to many shifts in the dance world, as the community has outspokenly criticized longstanding practices and cultural norms. However, no one has called into question the structure (or, rather, the lack thereof) of the job market. As a now-retired ballet dancer of nearly a decade and a PhD student in economics at Harvard, I know that incorporating basic lessons from economics could change the game for both dancers and directors.

The ballet job market is what an economist would refer to as a “matching market”—you cannot simply choose where to go, but you must also be chosen. What makes the ballet market peculiar is that, unlike most professional athletic markets, directors have vastly different preferences for dancers and they mostly do not (and cannot) compete for hires with salaries. Rather, dancers are first and foremost committed to finding their best artistic fits and are often willing to work for less than their worth.

This phenomenon would not be quite as problematic if dancers and directors were nonetheless matched efficiently. Unfortunately, there are two major failures that plague the current system.

First, although many, but not all, major ballet companies in the U.S. operate under the dancers’ union AGMA, there is virtually no regulation in terms of hiring. Deadlines to hold auditions, renew or cancel contracts are company-specific and are not standardized industry-wide. This is problematic because when streams of dancers are released into the audition market at different times, both companies and dancers can end up with undesirable results.

Here’s an example: A dancer knows she will be let go early in the season and begins a job search right away. Other companies, ones that hold auditions later or whose dancers have several months to return their contracts, do not know how many places they will have available and so they tell her they might—or might not—make her an offer down the road. She may then feel pressured to accept an offer that expires in a matter of weeks from another, less preferred company.

Still, she’s better off than the dancer who’s let go after auditions have already passed. I’ve also known directors to rescind verbal offers to dancers very late in the season, instigating a chain reaction that not only leaves the dancer worse off, but also the other companies that would’ve preferred to hire her but were unable to do so.

This coordination failure is made worse by the fact that many dancers wishing to leave their current jobs typically do not announce their departures until they’ve secured other positions—and for good reason. But directors at saturated companies cannot make additional offers until they know who is definitively leaving. This is what I refer to as “holdup.” There are many favorable “trades” available across companies, but either someone has to first give up their job without a guarantee of another, or a director needs to seek out additional funds in order to start the trading process.

This is where market design comes in. This field, which seeks to find economic engineering solutions to practical problems, has studied similar failures in markets like the medical residency matching program, public school choice and vaccine allocation.

One of the central tenets of good market design is creating market “thickness,” or bringing together as many people as possible at once so the best outcomes can be achieved. By centralizing industry-wide contract renewal dates and audition time-frames, not only would companies avoid coordination failures, but this would also eliminate the unnecessary anxiety that dancers face by not knowing when they might receive an offer and when they should accept one.

This practice has become commonplace in other highly competitive settings in the U.S., such as legal clerkships and PhD programs, which do not require students to accept any offers before a standardized date. It is also the reason why most markets that bring together various traders, including the New York Stock Exchange, open and close at the same time each day.

In other settings, centralized clearinghouses have been enormously effective in eliminating similar market failures. Specifically, what I have in mind is a variant that I’ve designed of the well-known top trading cycles algorithm. It would work something like this: After all company departures have been announced and auditions held, dancers and directors would simply submit their preferences to a centralized algorithm that would quickly determine final assignments based on those preferences. While this may sound radical, variants of top trading cycles have been used in school assignment settings and most notably in the kidney exchange system in the U.S., an innovation for which economist Alvin Roth was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2012.

The assignments resulting from this process are guaranteed to be efficient. The process also encourages all dancers to submit their preferences over companies truthfully, eliminating another major element of anxiety. By streamlining hiring in this way, both parties get their best shots at their most preferred counterparts, while trades across companies at capacity can happen swiftly and without the need for additional expense.

Of course, centralized clearinghouses are most effective when the majority of the market agrees to partake in them. While leaders may fear that this would require them to relinquish some control, they would only make offers to the dancers who they would under the best possible scenario, and the gains they would achieve by thickening and coordinating the market would far outweigh any perceived losses.

As new leaders begin to take the reins at companies around the globe, time will tell whether they will be brave enough to challenge the status quo and reshape the marketplace in a way that truly works for both dancers and directors.

The post The Ballet Job Market Needs a Market (Re)Design appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Many years ago, I had an experience at the Museum of Modern Art that rocked me hard. At a Willem de Kooning retrospective, there was a timeline of his career that detailed his stylistic shifts. Among other things, he worked as a house painter, a muralist, an abstract expressionist, a sculptor, then in figurative landscapes before returning to abstraction. I had an epiphany: Of course he worked on different things as he became interested in different ideas or was exposed to different influences. He evolved as a human. Why wouldn’t his art reflect that?

At the time, I was in the early stages of my transition from ballet to contemporary dance. I’d known how to be a ballet dancer, was well-versed on how to lead that daily life. It wasn’t easy, but it was familiar. And while discovering the contemporary, postmodern scene was invigorating, it was also disorienting. I’d walked away from the aesthetics, routine and people that I’d known.

Our field requires commitment, and for people who don’t want to disappoint, breaking up—with a director, a company, a show, a genre—can be a challenge. As dancers, we lovingly invest in relationships and repetition, but this can also render us creatures of habit who are particularly resistant to doing things differently.

I hadn’t realized it when I was in the thick of it, but my knowledge of the dance world then was myopic. Even though I’d left one chapter to begin the next, I was still looking backwards more than I was able to look ahead. I kept comparing myself to the dancer I’d once been, in part because other people kept pointing out how much I looked like a ballerina when I’d execute contemporary work. I did myself no favors by getting stuck in the labels I let others put on me, and the labels I put on myself.

Sometimes when we work exclusively on behalf of a singular idea of “right,” one way can easily become the only way. Devotion can be a vacuum. We become so laser-focused that we exclude the possibility of options,­ and we might find ourselves stuck, whether it be in a particular style or a certain work situation. But when you don’t—or can’t—allow space for change, you impede your growth as an artist. Even when we say we want to “improve,” we often forget that that itself is a form of change!

With an expansive mindset, change doesn’t have to be so precipitous or vertiginous. Allowing ourselves to be insatiably curious can help to unzip narrow notions of success and identity, thereby softening our perceptions of what’s at stake in a career transition. The words “pivot” and “resilience” have gotten a lot of airtime during the pandemic, yet their definitions are invaluable. In this era of the Great Resignation, many dancers are rethinking their career paths. It’s easy to forget that while change is most commonly considered reactive, it can also be proactive. What if moving forward could be less about negating prior experiences and more about pulling back the layers of an onion? It’s all part of a whole.

I took my first improvisation workshop at age 27. The opening prompt was to move in response to elements in the ornately decorated room. The instructor, Todd Williams, offered a sample demonstration, during which he endowed the smallest body parts, like his little toe, with the same power for expression as the more obvious parts. In a mere 15 seconds, I experienced a radical paradigm shift that helped dislodge a mental block that had been holding me back. I’d never considered that my own body could be a spontaneous, generative force, or that I had the agency to invent movement that still celebrated the clarity of line that I spent so many years honing in ballet.

When I did venture back to a ballet class after five years away, it was with a newfound peace. At that point in my contemporary work, I was no longer adamant about breaking away from or disguising my past. I let it carry me forward, and my artistry deepened. As de Kooning once said: “After a while all kinds of painting becomes just painting for you—abstract or otherwise.”

What artistic adventures will be found on the timeline of your retrospective?

Making Growth Manageable

With micromovements, we can start small and invite fluidity in on a daily basis.
Postmodern choreographer Deborah Hay is known for sounding her wakeup call in blunt language: “Turn your [expletive] head!” If that doesn’t resonate, consider these concrete, actionable steps to become more comfortable with change:

1. Cross-train your brain. Investigate something you know nothing about.
2. Reinvest in action verbs. Be purposeful in how you taste, touch, harvest, concoct, share.
3. Reacquaint yourself with wonder. Be moved by the beauty found in unexpected people, places and things

The post Shifting From a Creature of Habit to an Ever-Evolving Artist Revitalized My Career appeared first on Dance Magazine.

I’m a white choreographer based on the ancestral lands of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, otherwise known as San Francisco. My recent book, Shifting Cultural Power: Questions and Case Studies in Performance, imagines equity-based models in dance that decenter whiteness.

Writing about anti-racism work is a fraught endeavor because, as a white person, I’ll always have blind spots. For example, the book includes a list of “25 Practices for Decolonizing Dance (and finding your Poetic Nerve).” In retrospect, I should have used different language.

“Decolonize” has become a ubiquitous term because colonialism is everywhere. Colonial legacies exist not only outside of us, in sociopolitical power dynamics, but also in our bodies. Colonial legacies pervade dominant cultural notions of time, value, space and language.

But Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s article “Decolonization is not a metaphor” criticizes use of the term in contexts other than the repatriation of Indigenous land, saying that decolonization “is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies.” Holding Tuck and Yang’s article in mind, I want to be more specific with my language when I talk about reorganizing the field to resist complicity with legacies of oppression. We can ask many questions that interrogate power and privilege in the field: How can we compose bodies in space and time without asserting power over those bodies? How can we resist monolithic meaning in dance? How do we disentangle authority from authorship? How can dancemaking be liberatory for everyone involved? How can we anchor dancemaking in authentic community and in trust? How can we dismantle white supremacy in the field? These questions are related to the important economic and political work of decolonization, but not synonymous with it.

I want to talk about aligning choreographic practice with commitments to mutual liberation. This is necessarily both structural and personal work. We must reorganize the underpinnings of art practice: our organizations, agreements with collaborators and relationships in the studio. We must democratize arts leadership, demand equitable contracting, train arts workers in cultural competency, add Indigenous representation to boards and staff, center BIPOC artists in programming, honor Indigenous protocol by acknowledging Native land, and advocate for reparations for the displacement of Indigenous peoples.

And politics don’t stop at the studio door. How can we integrate political commitments into our dances, our bodies?

With this context in mind, I offer this revised list of prompts from Shifting Cultural Power: “25 Practices for Aligning Choreographic Practice with a Commitment to Mutual Liberation.”

1. The space should not be white-dominated. Indigenous people and people of color should be fully integrated, engaged, empowered, acknowledged and respected in the cast, crew and artistic staff.
2. Practice sustained listening.
3. Encourage imperfection and doubt (yours and others).
4. Slow down. Value pause. Waste time. Wander.
5. Value pleasure.
6. Invite excess, kitsch, camp, sentimentality and overmuchness.
7. Orient the dance and its systems outward. Make in relationship. Make dance in the mess of the world.
8. Allow the dancing to be invisible, ambiguous and illegible.
9. There is no original, truest version of movement. Movement material is collectively owned and authored.
10. Allow edges to be a part of the landscape of the dance. Refuse a fixed front.
11. Be transparent about your needs and your fallibility as an artist. Be clear about the terms of the work with yourself and your collaborators. Name collaborative periods of work. Name when you need to author or edit.
12. Acknowledge and credit sources of movement, both in the studio (“This is a phrase that Jane made.” “I pulled this idea off of YouTube.”) and in promotional materials (“This dance was co-created by…”).
13. Allow for multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple variables, multiple vocabularies. Develop a vocabulary of inclusion sourced from multiple bodies. What does it mean to express authorship amidst multiplicity?
14. Acknowledge and pay attention to how everyone in the room works at different processing speeds. Orient the process to different people’s sense of time.
15. Explore what it might mean for the dance to be porous. What can you let into the space of the dance?
16. Practice making without a show in mind. Hold the creative process lightly while still staying engaged,
    accountable and supportive of others in the space.
17. Allow improvisation to take over the process. Maintain a state of radical uncertainty about what the dance might become.
18. Allow for sustained movement research outside of the task of making. Find creative modes beyond composition and mimicry.
19. Collaborate with people and places that destabilize and challenge authorship.
20. Question your choices. Question instinctual preferences. Work with a palette you despise. Stay with an idea much longer than you think is appropriate.
21. Invite other people’s emotional lives into the work.
22. Invite other people to hijack the process.
23. Practice financial transparency about artist pay, project budget and funding sources.
24. Show up with no agenda. Work with what and who is in the room.
25. Be vulnerable.

If I were to implement all of the above prompts, I might not end up making a dance at all. But there’s value in putting ourselves in a destabilized space and listening for what comes next. These are prompts for locating your political and poetic nerve. Poetic nerve does not necessarily mean surrendering authorship. It means going beyond yourself, and then back within again, and then again out past yourself, and so on, in a constant conversation between the dance and the world.

Doing the Work

These ideas are not mine. Throughout the vast and violent span of colonial history, dance artists, especially Native artists and artists of color, have been doing and continue to do this work. There’s Sydnie L. Mosley, advocating for liberation of dance pedagogy through practices such as acknowledging that “all dance forms are specific cultural practice and should be acknowledged and specifically named as such”; Mar Parrilla’s cultural exchange projects with Puerto Rico–based artists and members of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe to explore colonial legacies; Emily Johnson, whose decolonization rider calls on presenter partners to commit to the “living process” of decolonization, including compliance with Indigenous Protocol, acknowledgment­ of host Nations in all press, and engagement with the Indigenous community. There are countless other examples.

Why am I, as a white person, even trying to talk about decolonization? Because for too long, Indigenous people and people of color have shouldered this work. In the words of feminist writer Judit Moschkovich, “it is not the duty of the oppressed to educate the oppressor.” White people must do this work too.

Q&A: What tools or tactics are you using in the studio to liberate your choreographic practice?

David Herrera, artistic director and choreographer for David Herrera Performance Company:

“I channel movement through emotional recall and muscle memory to return to a time when studio teachings did not dictate how I performed or danced. I swayed, gyrated, stomped, shook my hips, pranced and spun before I ever stepped into a modern dance class. Through this approach, I am actively shedding the heavily calloused, conditioned layers of white modern dance technique. It’s a slow and arduous process; a relearning of feeling, instinct and physicality. I aim to liberate myself from the burden of aesthetics that were not inherent to my cultural upbringing or my brown body.”

Yayoi Kambara, dancer, choreographer, teacher and director of KAMBARA+:
“I dismantle systems of oppression, colonization and power by creating space to liberate our imaginations. I build artistic teams that value curiosity and mistakes. I confront my intentions behind each movement. Ballet is associated with whiteness, but it’s part of my training. When I’m making movement that twists, curves, quirks and springs, something from ballet often appears. I love a good à la seconde. But à la seconde has no inherent value. When à la seconde shows up in my choreography, it can be anything: honest, strong, vulnerable. No two bodies do it identically. Often I pause inside a ballet position and then fall out of it. Just as I consider the values behind my movement, my dances invite audiences to consider their own values.” —As told to Hope Mohr

The post 25 Prompts to Liberate Your Choreographic Practice appeared first on Dance Magazine.

If you ask experts in the performance industry, they’ll tell you that one of the best ways to book work in 2022 is to post content online for casting directors and agencies to see. Even better? A dance reel that demonstrates your skill in a variety of genres.

Unfortunately for me, the last legit video I have of myself dancing was taken 10 years ago at JUMP Dance Convention. (Did I still use the footage? Obviously. Seventeen-year-old Haley was on fire that day! Was it enough to fill an entire reel? Absolutely not.)

So I recently took on a humongous task: I rehearsed, filmed and edited five different individual pieces that I combined into a single dance reel. Then, I went through a similar process for my acting and vocal reels.

Whew—it was a lot!

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Haley, we talked about this: You can’t do too much or your health will regress.” Don’t worry—I spread my projects out, I scheduled shoots at mostly reasonable hours (when I couldn’t be reasonable, I went to bed super early), and I accepted help from a bunch of wonderful people.

And it was worth it: I was really happy with the result! Here’s how I made personal promotional content that I’m proud of, using tips from industry experts.

Prep Work

When I began ruminating on this project in September, I interviewed talent consultant Leesa Csolak, CEO of lbctalent.com and director of Launch Talent, on crucial dos and don’ts for creating reels. First, she let me know that any assets I send to agencies need to be concise. “Your reel should be roughly one minute long, and even then, they likely won’t watch more than 10 seconds of it,” Csolak says. She recommended including clips from a variety of genres so that agencies and casting directors can see my range, then separately share full videos of each piece on social media or through Dropbox/Google Drive folders in case agents or casting directors want to explore my work further.

I started with a contemporary piece I choreographed titled “I Lived,” which is about my experience living with chronic illness. It’s personal, and important to me, and I am so grateful I was able to capture it. I also did a jazz piece titled “Oh Darling,” choreographed by Sabrina Phillip, a musical-theater combo titled “Call Me Irresponsible,” choreographed by Scott Fowler, a “jazz-plus” combo titled “Kokomo,” by Dana Wilson, and a jazz-funk combo by Bobby Newberry to “Good For You.” (The last three combinations came from virtual CLI classes.)

For the most part I prepped these numbers on my own in an affordable rehearsal space, but as the shoot dates loomed closer, I rehearsed with my friend and Broadway performer Libby Lloyd at Ripley-Grier Studios to get feedback on my dancing and clean things up a bit.

For acting and voice, Csolak recommended including two or three juxtaposing monologues and songs that fit my casting type. Once again, she said they should be short, and that I should get some expert advice on choosing material. I worked with my acting coach, Andrew Dolan from the Freeman Studio, to choose a comedic monologue from the film He’s Just Not That Into You and a dramatic monologue from the play Mary Jane, by Amy Herzog. Then I worked with a rep coach (someone who can listen to my voice and send over material they think would be a good fit) named Abby Middleton, and my voice coach, Rebecca Soelberg, to prepare a pop song, a golden-age ballad and an upbeat contemporary song.

Filming

I started my shoots with “I Lived,” at sunrise on a rooftop with the Manhattan skyline in the background. The videographer I worked with, Jacob Hiss, shoots for Steps on Broadway. I had been following his work on social media for a while and decided to shoot my shot by direct-messaging him on Instagram. I let him know the details of my project (how long the shoot would last, how long the finished video would be, how many cuts of the video I wanted) and asked what his rates were for something like this. He responded with a ballpark estimate, and graciously accepted the opportunity to work together. Then, I reached out to a friend who lives in a building with rooftop access and asked if she would let us use it. I brought along my husband and my dear friend Hannah Nixon to assist with lights and music. The shoot began at 5:45 am (hello, 4 am wakeup call!) and lasted 45 minutes in the freezing cold. (Barefoot dancing on a windy rooftop in the middle of November is not for the faint of heart.) I cannot wait to show you the results!

For the second video, “Oh Darling,” I worked with Broadway Dance Center videographer Jeremy Davidson. Once again, I reached out through social media, and he took me up on working together. Jeremy is an incredibly talented dance videographer, and a warm and encouraging human being. This shoot was so good for my soul! We filmed in a beautiful studio at Gibney (a little pricey, but worth it for the final footage). I brought another friend along to assist with the 90-minute shoot.

The next two videos, “Call Me Irresponsible” and “Kokomo,” were filmed by two of my photographer/videographer friends, Katie Gallardo and McKall Dodd, and they absolutely crushed the assignment. We filmed in a beautiful studio at Arts On Site in the East Village at 8 am on a Saturday morning. The price was reasonable and the space was perfect for what I needed. The fifth video, “Good For You,” was once again filmed by my friend Katie, this time in Central Park at the Naumburg Bandshell on a Thursday afternoon. (It’s always fun to put on a little show for the tourists walking by!)

For my acting and vocal reels, I borrowed a backdrop structure from a photographer friend and hung my sheets over it for a solid background. I set it in front of my bright windows at home and filmed over three consecutive days. (I probably could have gone faster, but the trouble with self-taping is you can always film again to try to make it better!) My vocal coach joined me for one of the shoot days and helped me set up my framing and work my microphone.

Editing

Let me tell you—I have mad respect for all the creators who edit footage for a living! Thankfully, “I Lived” and “Oh Darling” were edited by the videographers. I edited the other three videos, as well as my reel, with help and feedback from friends and loved ones. I went down a YouTube rabbit hole to see what kinds of music most people use for reels and found that electronic songs seem to be a favorite. So, I decided on Paradise, by MEDUZA, featuring Dermot Kennedy.

The Portfolio of Work

And voilà! I have a portfolio of work that I am prepared to send to agencies. This was a true labor of love made possible by kind people who shared their time and talents with me.

I am bleary-eyed and exhausted and ready for the week-and-a-half break I am giving myself after this.

Check out my latest YouTube video on Dance Magazine’s channel to see a full version of my final reel.

The post Begin Again: The Real Deal With Creating a Dance Reel appeared first on Dance Magazine.