NEXTSTEPPAD

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.

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

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.