Learn Center Stage’s Iconic Jazz Choreo From Susan Stroman Herself

If you’ve ever wanted to master the iconic jazz-class combo from Center Stage, now’s your chance.

In celebration of the movie’s 20th anniversary, choreographer Susan Stroman is teaming up with Broadway Dance Center and Open Jar Studios to lead a tutorial on the infectious “Higher Ground” routine for the first time ever.

Join Stroman, a decorated Tony winner, December 10 from 1 to 3 pm Eastern, as her work leaps from the silver screen to your Zoom room. She’ll be accompanied by her associate, James Gray, and a bevy of Broadway dancers: Afra Hines (Hadestown), Robyn Hurder (Moulin Rouge!), Clyde Alves (On The Town), Ahmad Simmons (West Side Story) and Joshua Buscher (Big Fish).

After the master class, hang around for a Q&A with Stroman and Center Stage cast members Sascha Radetsky (Charlie), Debra Monk (Maureen’s mother) and Priscilla Lopez (who led the movie’s jazz class).

Register here
for $25, and start practicing your pirouette drills so that you can “just forget about the steps” and “just dance the sh*t out of it!”

The post Learn Center Stage’s Iconic Jazz Choreo From Susan Stroman Herself appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Forget fad diets: here are 5 dietary strategies that actually work

Too much stress has come from the misinformation out there about how to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight. This information deluge on diet tricks is heightened in the dance world.

As a dietitian for dancers for the past 11 years, and a former professional dancer myself, I’ve seen the real-life damage that these internet and fad diets do to a dancer’s instrument and mental state. I’ve worked with numerous dancers and athletes to undo fad diet damage and help get them on track with a way of eating that not only supports their energy levels and health, but also helps achieve a body that’s competitive for scholarships and contracts. I know that it’s possible to achieve results in a healthy way with a little thought and preparation. For a deeper dive into the different fad diets, check out the Dance Informa articles linked below. As we move into the holiday season and new year, I want to highlight here the top tricks that I know work.

Smaller, more frequent meals and snacks 

The first, and arguably most important, diet fad to avoid is going for too long without eating. I know that intermittent fasting is popular, but it backfires in the long run with added weight gain over time and compromises a dancer’s muscle tone, endurance and injury risk. Dancers will actually have an easier time losing fat but keeping muscle if they eat strategically 6+ smaller, more frequent meals/snacks per day based on their energy needs.

For example, if dance class is in the morning, eat a strong breakfast with the types carbohydrates that improve weight management such as rolled oats, whole grain toast and fruit. Studies show that people who eat breakfast have an easier time managing weight over time. When dancers switch to eating about every 3 hours with portion sizes crafted to meet their energy needs for the next 2-3 hours after that meal, it supports maintaining or building muscle tissue. It also reduces the desire to overeat later in the day because dancers aren’t famished. People tend to make smarter food choices when they aren’t starving. It’s very hard to avoid tempting cookies and fried foods when you haven’t eaten in six hours.

Focus on fiber

The second most important diet trick is to fill up on high fiber foods. These fill you up for less calories (and less money usually) but are packed with nutrients. Fiber is only found in plant foods, so make beans, lentils, peas, edamame, fruits, vegetables (particularly leafy greens) be the stars of your dietary plan. Let go of this outdated high protein, low carb fad. Of course, dancers need more protein than their non-active friends, but that doesn’t mean you eat excess protein with this mistaken belief that it will magically help with weight loss. What really works is filling up on a wide variety of plants. This takes a bit of planning and does require some food prep, but once you get used to bringing a container of carrots and apples for snack, having a large salad as part of your overall lunch and having 1-2 servings of roasted or steamed veggies for dinner, it will feel like second nature. The trick is not overdoing the oil, cream dressings or cheese as toppings for veggies. A little goes a long way.

Eating soups regularly has been shown to fill up study participants with less overall calories. Many soups can be nutrition powerhouses with beans and lentils, greens, carrots, whole grain pasta or wild rice like in a Minestrone soup, for example1. Just limit the creamy soups.

Sugar 

Too much refined sugar can knock a hole in even the most carefully planned diet. Keep added sugars in beverages, baked goods and candy to occasional treats, not daily occurrences. (I’m looking at that fancy coffee drink that at only 16 ounces has twice the sugar as a king sized Snickers.) Many fad diets include fruit in the “sugar” category, and this couldn’t be more false. While fruit does have fructose (a type of sugar), it is also a good source of fiber and vitamins. Bottom line, eat fruit to fill that sweet craving while filling up on fiber, and keep refined sweets to occasional treats. Eating fruit can be a great way to have a filling snack between meals. It’s also hydrating.

Smart dietary fats 

Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, low fat diets were popular. These types of fad diets still come back in different forms today. They didn’t work mostly because people didn’t really eat as low fat as they thought they were and because fats were often replaced with sugars in the American diet at that time (and still today). Studies show that a diet with primarily unsaturated fats, found in plants like nuts, seeds, avocados and olives, for example, is better at helping people lose and maintain weight than a diet with saturated fats like butter, pork, beef, palm oil and even too much coconut oil. We should all be avoiding trans fats in foods like shelf-stable baked goods (like Twinkies, for example).

I tend to recommend about 25 percent of total calories from mostly plant-based fats for my clients, but it’s been shown that even moving from a 38 percent fat saturated fat diet to a 28 percent unsaturated fat diet will result in weight loss1. You do not have to fear or avoid all dietary fats to have a professional-level dancer body; you just have to make smarter choices most of the time. Meaning have a palm full of nuts every day. Cook with a teaspoon of olive oil per serving, add seeds to your recipes and smoothies, add avocado to your meals. Avocado is actually high in fiber anyway. Enjoy plant-centric fat sources, and minimize saturated fats in butter, cheese and animal meats. I will never tell anyone to avoid grandma’s pie. You must eat her pie.

Additional strategies shown to work

Getting adequate sleep is essential. It has been shown that even a small sleep deficit can lead to increased caloric intake during the day and weight gain over time. Another key strategy is to have a solid hydration plan. Don’t just say you’re going to try to drink more. Make a specific goal such as 1-2 cups before each meal and 1-2 cups between meals and snacks. Adequate water intake and smart beverage choices can make or break a diet plan. Many sodas can have 20+ spoonfuls of sugar in them. Some studies show that hibiscus tea, green tea and ginger can aid in weight loss. Whether they do or do not, they’re certainly delicious and healthy.

Links to take a deeper dive into Dance Informa’s past articles on fad diets:  

How eating more, not less, leads to a healthy dancer weight

Intermittent Fasting: What dancers need to know about this latest diet trend

Why energy balance is the underappreciated secret to healthy weight and more energy

Keto Concerns: Is Keto Diet unsafe for dancers?

Paleo — good diet for dancers? Nutrition experts weigh in

Sources:

  1. Greger M. How Not To Diet: the groundbreaking science of healthy, permanent weight loss. Flatiron Books NY, 2019
Emily Harrison Dance Nutritionist

By Emily C. Harrison MS, RDN, LDN of Nutrition for Great Performances.

Emily Cook Harrison MS, RD, LD 
Emily is a registered dietitian and holds both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in nutrition from Georgia State University, USA. Her master’s thesis research was on elite level ballet dancers and nutrition and she has experience providing nutrition services for weight management, sports nutrition, disordered eating, disease prevention, and food allergies. Emily was a professional dancer for eleven years with the Atlanta Ballet and several other companies. She is a dance educator and the mother of two young children. She now runs the Centre for Dance Nutrition and Healthy Lifestyles. She can be reached at emily@dancernutrition.com
www.dancernutrition.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Courtesy Evans

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evans clings onto a gold pole between her thighs high up in a warehouse

Courtesy Evans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey

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

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

Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker

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

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

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

The post These Two New Dance-Filled Flicks Are Getting Us Into the Holiday Spirit appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Exclusion Is Oppression: From Pedagogy to Performance

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

Dance Education Rooted in Oppression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things to Consider as We Work Towards Inclusion

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

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

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

• Alter dress codes and hairstyles that negatively impact BIPOC.

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

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

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

• Embrace, and cite, Black culture.

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

My Life as an Invisible Black Choreographer

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

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

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

Two Black men dance on an outdoor stage in front of the Hudson River, with the Statue of Liberty in the background. One man lies on the ground, supporting the other dancer from behind as he reaches upward, slightly suspended off the floor in a straddle split.

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

Julia Crawford, Courtesy Ja’ Malik

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now That She’s Back at Work, Lia Cirio Shares the Hobbies, Music and More That Got Her Through the Shutdown

Boston Ballet has recently gone back to the studios, starting up rehearsals again (with multiple safety precautions in place) to prepare for a hybrid performance season. For principal Lia Cirio, it’s a welcome return. But she never really stopped moving during the six-month shutdown. On top of creating dance films, holding a season for the Cirio Collective and designing T-shirts to raise money for various causes, she was also commissioned to create a new work for Boston Ballet’s ChoreograpHER program next May.

Dance Magazine recently caught up with her for our “For Your Entertainment” series to hear about the hobbies, books, podcasts, memes and more that have kept her going.

Pandemic hobbies:

“I picked up my ukulele a few times and learned to play some songs. I also did a few fun, DIY arts-and-crafts projects. I created a small T-shirt (and some other products) line called Art Heals. A friend and I created a logo and I chose a saying for each product such as ‘Art Heals… Wash Your Hands,’ and the proceeds went to different organizations. The first shirt raised about $1,000 for the Greater Boston Food Bank. I just released my newest design and product to raise money for the Elizabeth Stone House in honor of Domestic Violence Awareness Month.”

Shutdown side projects:

“During quarantine, the only way I could stay sane was to stay as busy as possible. A fellow principal dancer, Paul Craig, and I created a dance video called ‘Reverie,‘ very early in the pandemic. After that, we worked with Helen Pickett on her project called Home Studies.

“My brother Jeffrey Cirio and I were able to hold a small and safe season of our contemporary dance company, Cirio Collective. We worked in a garage in Martha’s Vineyard and created a dance film with filmmaker Quinn Wharton.

“And just a few days before Boston Ballet’s season began, I finished another project with Helen Pickett. Now that we are back, my focus is on being back in work mode.”

Online classes:

“I never actually took Worldwide Ballet Class‘s live classes during quarantine, but when I started getting back in shape and was able to dance in a studio again, I utilized their YouTube playbacks. I loved taking Darla Hoover’s class, as well as Chris Stowell’s and Rubén Martín Cintas’. I think the whole dance community is so grateful to Ruben and Diego Cruz for these classes.

“I’ve also been doing Pilates and yoga classes through obé fitness, and have continued to do so now that we are back to work.”

New self-care routine:

“I bought a stationary bike to do cardio while gyms and SoulCycle were closed. Now that I have that routine of waking up and getting on the bike, I’ve kept doing it every day before work. And Pilates and yoga through obé. Pilates has always been a part of my warm-up but now, more than ever, it’s hard for me to start class without a cat–cow or a number of downward-facing dogs!”

On her bookshelf:

“I am about to start reading The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue from this month’s Book of the Month. Two of my favorites that I’ve read in the past few months are Normal People (loved the Hulu series as well) and The Guest List (a wedding murder mystery).”

Netflix binges:

“Currently, I am watching (more like bingeing) ‘The 100′ on Netflix. I also loved ‘The Umbrella Academy‘ and ‘Selling Sunset!’

Favorite podcast:

“I love listening to ‘Song Exploder.‘ It is a podcast where music artists break down their songs and the little details that go into making them. I love hearing each artist’s unique process and the thoughts behind it all. It reminds me of choreography. My favorite is Hozier’s ‘Nina Cried Power’ episode and the Fleetwood Mac episode.

Recent movie recs:

“I am pretty lucky to be living in Massachusetts and that our COVID-19 numbers have been fairly low. We have returned safely and slowly to a new normal. A few weeks ago I was able to go to a real-life movie theater with my quarantine bubble of friends. We saw Tenet and my mind was blown. I highly recommend!

“In the beginning of the pandemic I watched Jojo Rabbit and have to say how incredible I feel that movie is. I loved it so much that I named my foster/newly-adopted kitten, Jojo, after the movie.”

Favorite Instagram accounts:

@the_happy_broadcast is such a great account to offset all the bad and sad news in the world. I mean, who wouldn’t want to know that rare pink dolphins have returned to Hong Kong? Or that it is illegal in Switzerland to own just one guinea pig because they get lonely?

“I also love following @paul.mescal because
🔥
and I loved him in the show ‘Normal People,’ and @livetheprocess because their brand is effortless and I love their energy. Of course, I can’t live without @balletmoods. That account kills it in the relatable dancer memes. I definitely always find myself LOLing.”

Music on repeat:

“Well, I was commissioned to create a new ballet for Boston Ballet’s ChoreograpHER, and so if you look at my Apple Music, Shostakovich and Dvořák are the most played. However, when I need a break from those beautiful pieces, Louis The Child’s new album Here For Now and Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia and her Club Future Nostalgia are on repeat.

“I also just got a new record from this year’s Record Store Day called Hi Tide Groove (DJ’s Choice 1969-1981). It’s so fun and perfect to play on a Sunday afternoon while cleaning or getting ready for the week ahead.”

Dance film obsession:

“When Nedelands Dans Theater released its ‘Standby‘ video by Paul Lightfoot, I literally could not stop watching it. I could not get enough of it. It’s so fresh, so inspiring, from the choreography and dancers, to the lighting and videography. I absolutely loved it!”

The post Now That She’s Back at Work, Lia Cirio Shares the Hobbies, Music and More That Got Her Through the Shutdown appeared first on Dance Magazine.

This New Netflix Series Profiles 6 of Today’s Coolest Choreographers

Get ready for your next Netflix binge: On October 23, the streaming giant is dropping Move, a five-part docuseries profiling some of the biggest choreographers and performers from around the globe. Each episode provides an intimate look at a different creator and their unique contributions to the art form.

First up are American-based Memphis jookin star Charles “Lil Buck” Riley and Jon Boogz, both founders of MAI (Movement Art Is). Subsequent episodes feature Gaga creator Ohad Naharin, of Israel; avant-garde flamenco star Israel Galván, of Spain; dancehall and Jamaican folk dance choreographer Kimiko Versatile; and kathak-meets-contemporary force Akram Khan, a British-based dancemaker of Bangladeshi descent.

Packed with striking dance footage, Move virtually transports dancers lovers around the world, at a time when the majority of travel remains restricted due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The post This New Netflix Series Profiles 6 of Today’s Coolest Choreographers appeared first on Dance Magazine.

A Pilates sequence for cross-training and re-centering in stressful times

Pilates is about centering, literally and figuratively — building core strength and finding one’s metaphorical center, one’s sense of inner strength and calm. The practice incorporates timing, shape and breath in reaching toward achieving goals in both areas — things that dancers are accustomed to working with and refining. Core strength (which we know goes beyond “washboard abs” — it’s about strength and integration of the muscular structure from the collarbones to the glutes) is essential to strong technique and confident artistry. A key example is finding one’s “center” for clean pirouettes. Dance technique in itself doesn’t get us there, hence the need for “cross-training” (practicing other movement forms for balanced fitness).

On that metaphorical level, dancers need a different kind of “core” strength — the kind of of inner strength that allows one to stay focused and committed through long days, hectic weeks, shifting schedules, side jobs, financial stress, the sometimes difficult journey journey to finding who one is as an artist and a thousand other stressful aspects of artists’ lives. Pilates has a mindful aspect that, similar to yoga, leaves space for practitioners observing how they act and react through learning and practicing the form. It focuses on breath and inner sensation, for example. Honing in on such elements can be profoundly calming, as well as informative.

In a time of social and economic upheaval, due to the outbreak of COVID-19, dancers could use an exercise form that brings that sort of calm. Bonus: it can be done with little equipment and space, with or without music. A thick mat is helpful, yet a soft carpet can also do the trick. The following Pilates sequence offers a centered calm and strength, as well as helping to build literal core strength, adaptable to various kinds of space and time. We hope that you enjoy it. Keep calm and practice on, keep moving and creating!

#1. Co-contraction: Keying into core strength, placement and integration

1. Lay on your back with your knees bent and your feet planted directly under them. Place your hands by your sides, palms down — yet if you want to move your hands up toward your stomach or chest at any point of this step, in order to feel your breath or core muscles working, feel free to do so.

2. Feel your lower belly and pelvic muscles engaging to keep your back fully flat on the mat. This is called “co-contraction” (muscles contracting together).

3. Scoop your lower belly in and point your tailbone toward the back of your knees — lifting ever so slightly, no more than an inch. With Pilates, less can truly be more! Breathe in as you do so. (That said, throughout this sequence, if the given breath sequence doesn’t feel natural to you, breathe in a way that does.)

4. As you breathe out, shift your tailbone so that it points downward, until you have a slight arch in your lower to middle back (slight enough that you could just about slide one of your hands under that arch — go ahead, try it, if you’d like!). Try to begin a smooth, rhythmic flow of breath with this step.

5. Shift back to where your tailbone is pointing at the back of your knees, and repeat those two steps above, 10-15 times. Key into what it feels like to move through these two positions and the muscular path that sequence engages. These are muscles that you’ll be engaging throughout this sequence (and Pilates practice more generally). Key into your breath pattern, and what it feels like to breathe in a fluid, rhythmic manner. Notice what it’s like to feel centered.

#2. Bridge Roll-Ups

1. From your tailbone pointing toward the back of your knees, as in the last step, raise your hips until you’re resting on only your shoulders (your back is almost all the way off your mat) and you’re making a slope from your knees to your collarbones. You’re essentially keeping that same pattern of pelvic tilting, just making it bigger. Keep the same breath pattern, as well, if it feels right for you.

2. Roll all the way back down, engaging deep core muscles so that you feel every vertebra in your spine hit the mat individually. Notice what that engagement feels like. To end, tilt your pelvis downward so that you have that small arch in your back.

3. Repeat that 5-10 times, slowly and mindfully. The tortoise, and not the hare, wins the race in Pilates. See if you can enjoy the feeling of coordinating your breath and movement. See if you can enjoy feeling your center — physically, mentally and emotionally.

*Level it up: Extend one foot forward, flexing it, lower leg on a slight diagonal, and then lower it back down once you’re in bridge, alternating feet with each bridge.

#3. Leg Circles

1. With your back flattened into your mat (“co-contracted”), raise your left leg to the sky. Point your raised foot and turn that leg out (from the hip and not the knee). Check in with your back, ensuring that nothing has changed with adjusting your left leg. It should stay still and stable throughout the whole exercise.

2. Make a small circle on the ceiling with your left big toe, breathing in. Stop short (but with the least amount of tension possible) at the point where you started the circle, and breathe out quick and accented — matching the quick stop of the circle — at the same time.

3. Repeat that 10-15 times, and then change the direction of the circle. Periodically check in with your breath (aiming for rhythmic and not tense) and that only your left leg is moving; everything else still.

4. Place your left foot down, and repeat steps 1-3 with your right leg up and making the circles. Continue to enjoy feeling your literal and metaphorical center — it’s always there, we just don’t always tune into it.

*Level it up: Lengthen and turn out the leg that’s not doing the circles.

#4. Rolling-like-a-ball  

1. Feeling centered includes keeping in touch with our sense of humor and play. A good belly laugh is also a great abdominal workout! To start this exercise bringing that, bring your knees into your chest. If it feels good, make some small, gentle circles with your knees to lightly massage your back.

2. When you’re ready, roll up to vertical — keeping your knees into your chest and maintaining a “c” shape in your upper body. Breathe in as you do so. For extra abdominal work, try not to let your toes touch the floor or mat below you.

3. Roll back down when you’re ready, sequencing back down through your vertebrae one by one. Breathe out, smoothly and easily.

4. Repeat that 10-15 times, allowing yourself to feel playful. Giggle, if that comes! To end, take any other small movements that feel good.

5. Check in with yourself. Do you feel centered, physically, mentally and emotional? How can you bring that feeling into the rest of your day, week and maybe even beyond?

*Level it up: Lengthen your legs in a narrow “V”, keeping the shape all throughout the “roll” yet also lengthening up through your spine as you come to vertical (also known as the “Open-Leg Rocker”).

By Kathryn Boland of Dance Informa.

The post A Pilates sequence for cross-training and re-centering in stressful times appeared first on Dance Informa Magazine.