Tag: Dance

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What’s a Dance Theater With out an Viewers?

What’s a Dance Theater Without an Audience?

At the Henry Street Playhouse on the Lower East Side, seats are empty, but the stage is crowded. The audience has disappeared, banned due to pandemic restrictions, but since last summer the stage has been covered with hundreds of bags of food every Tuesday for stage workers, theater workers and artists to deliver to nearby housing projects and retirement homes.

Converting a theater into a pantry is just one way to respond when the audience is not admitted. NYU Skirball hosted the early voting in its lobby. New York Live Arts offered bathrooms and accessories for Black Lives Matter protesters last summer. The Brooklyn Academy of Music served its neighborhood as a distribution center for meals and hygiene products and as a training center for census workers. Closed theaters have also undergone physical maintenance, both lengthy maintenance (roofs, seats) and pandemic-inspired updates (filter systems).

But even in these places – New York theaters that present dance and help make New York a dance capital – dancing has continued: rehearsals, filming and live streams. New York Live Arts put on performances in its glass-walled lobby that can be viewed from the sidewalk outside or via live streaming. The Chocolate Factory Theater in Queens had a choreographer camp out there for a few weeks to document the experience.

But what is dance theater without an audience, even if there is dance?

Management was forced to reconsider this. And as they announced plans for spring and summer – mostly digital, with a bit of nature, and decked out in person – many New York dance hosts spoke in recent interviews about what they were up to and how the pandemic changed their business.

“People think these theaters are dark, but we’ve never worked harder,” said Craig Peterson, artistic director of the Abrons Arts Center, which also includes the Henry Street Playhouse.

Even with no box office receipts, most artists continued to pay, sometimes with no expectation of a product or performance in return. “Only do something if you want to” was a pretty common attitude from presenter to artist.

And yet about a dozen of the moderators surveyed said they would survive financially. Most of the theaters that perform dance in New York are nonprofits, and especially for the smaller theaters, the box office never made up most of their budget. The main sources of income (grants, donors) and new aid (paycheck protection program loans) have come through.

At the same time, the longstanding resistance to digital streaming, based in part on the fear of obstructing live participation, has weakened. Dance theaters have released a deluge of content online, with little or no cost – they are investing in new productions and pulling off the shelf archive material. They have significantly increased the number of people and the geographic area they can reach. What does it all mean when the theaters reopen?

When the theaters first closed in March, everyone was “kind of paralyzed,” Peterson said. With Abrons affiliated with Henry Street Settlement, a social assistance agency, it found a purpose early on to re-dispatch staff to help distribute food in April.

“I had all of this technical and operational staff who were suddenly out of work,” Peterson said on Tuesday as he helped load a van with food. “These are smart people who solve complex problems. They were well suited for the task. “

It’s not that Abrons gave up on art. It paid canceled artists their fees and an estimate of what they might have made from ticket sales. An Artists Community Relief Fund has been set up to provide micro-cost grants. “I keep collecting and putting money back,” said Peterson.

Looking ahead, the theater has some live performances scheduled in its small outdoor amphitheater in April and May. Still, Peterson said, “This is a moment when cultural institutions have to say, ‘We can do more. ‘”Abrons has applied to become a vaccination center and he’s calling on other theaters to do the same.

Most theaters have been paralyzed for a long time. Jay Wegman, the managing director of Skirball, spoke of the “moving goal” – repeatedly pushing back plans to reopen. This is what Aaron Mattocks, program director at Joyce Theater, called “the purgatory of the hold pattern.”

“I’ve been on the phone with the 65 planned companies for the past six months,” said Mattocks. “And every time we have different circumstances, I spend another six weeks checking in with all 65 again.”

In the midst of these scenarios, in which scenarios were created and recreated, the Joyce immersed itself in live streaming for the first time. State of Darkness, the digital program presented in October, was originally planned for a reduced personal audience.

“I kept saying, ‘Let’s wait for an audience,” said Linda Shelton, Joyce’s executive director, “but the dancers said,’ We have to dance this now. ‘”

And so, like other theaters, the Joyce had to develop its own coronavirus protocols for planning, testing and cleaning – an enormous effort and expense. However, the positive response to this program prompted the theater to present a second live stream with Pam Tanowitz Dance in December. And now Joyce goes all-in, showcasing a full virtual spring season kicking off February 18 with Ronald K. Brown / Evidence.

Still, there is some hesitation. With every livestream he plans, Mattocks said he would think, “Is this how I want to present this artist? Am I throwing something away? “

The New York City Center has been drawn into digital dance in a similar manner. Stanford Makishi, vice president of programming, said the theater had plans to showcase its popular Fall for Dance festival to a personal audience. This turned out to be impossible, so the festival was streamed online in October. It was successful enough – in terms of reviews, reach (all 50 states, dozen of countries), and artist and staff safety – to get the city center to invest in more digital dance, which will be announced soon.

“I expect this will be an integral part of our programming in the future,” said Makishi. “Especially at the beginning of the reopening, some people will be nervous and we need a digital component for them to join us.”

City Center, Joyce, Skirball, and the Brooklyn Academy have also presented – or plan to display – digital content filmed in theaters outside of New York. In these cases, the New York theater is a channel and a marketer, a link to a mailing list, and a subscriber base that trusts its selections.

“It turns out that presenters have the audience,” Shelton said. “What we somehow knew. We just don’t have the content. “

“We can’t wait for the audience,” said Jed Wheeler, the artistic director of Peak Performances at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Since December, Peak has been paying prominent dance and theater companies to complete and perform new, fully produced, full-length works in its theater – for no one but staff and crew.

Cameras capture the performances, which can later be broadcast (free of charge) through a partnership with WNET All-Arts. The films are a student resource, but the main purpose, Wheeler says, is to keep artists working. “There is no audience and no income,” he said. “Does that mean we can’t have artists? No.”

(One choreographer, Emily Johnson, recently criticized Wheeler’s interactions with her in a letter posted on Medium. The university responded on its website, denying some of her characterizations.)

For Wheeler, this public-free moment offers the opportunity to rethink how “butt on your seat” controls the creative process. For Judy Hussie-Taylor, director of the Danspace project, it is a time to do “quiet work”. Danspace, who paid artists without their having to do anything, raised additional funding for videographers but focused more on conversation and “asked artists what they need instead of assuming we know,” said Hussie-Taylor .

“What we’ve taken off the table is the printing of the result,” said Brian Rogers, the chocolate factory’s artistic director. “Here is our money, here is our place, let’s do something and not think about what could become of it. Nobody can have shows and there is a nice freedom in that. “

Bill T. Jones, the artistic director of New York Live Arts, thinks differently. “I wish we were more dependent on earned income, we had more shows that make money,” he said. “Can you see a world where we are healing from Covid and actually becoming viable actors in the capitalist structure?”

Meanwhile, New York Live Arts has also donated unconditional money and experimented with digital formats to see how best to support performing artists.

“This is a long night for the soul,” said Jones, “and we have to question everything and keep moving.”

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From Sadler’s Wells, a Sampler of British Dance

From Sadler’s Wells, a Sampler of British Dance

When one door closes, another opens. During the pandemic, this maxim had a consequence for concert dance: when the theater doors close, digital portals multiply. With Britain locked again, Sadler’s Wells Theater in London is closed to the public, but its dance program is now available for free on its website, at least in the form of a tasting menu, three hour shows called “Dancing Nation”.

For the London audience, it’s partly a substitute for what can be got. But for the rest of the world this was something we didn’t have before, certainly not in such a handy package: an opportunity to try British dance. And the selection that has been filmed in the theater most recently is clearly conceived as a sampler: large national institutions alongside upstarts, a range of styles, a geographical spread.

“You don’t think of Britain as a dancing nation, but it is,” says Alistair Spalding, the artistic director of Sadler’s Wells, in the first episode. This statement is significant. These are shows that profess to dance (and are proud of the local scene) but assume that audiences don’t – that they need to be sold.

Dancing Nation is a collaboration with BBC Arts and the programs have the feel of a BBC travel show. Seasoned correspondent Brenda Emmanus moderates and introduces each piece with booster adjectives (“amazing”, “groundbreaking”), pamphlet descriptions (“a powerful piece about a couple dealing with depression”) and instructions on how to respond (“seen once “Never Forget”). After each dance, she keeps holding her hand and repeats some of these elements just in case.

Ahead of some recordings, Emmanus interviews choreographers and artistic directors and checks how they survived, who got live shows between locks and how they switched to digital. Nothing really rises above polite chat, but that way the shows deliver a bit of contextual padding, little news.

All in all, it’s a comforting product that greets large audiences with conventions of mild professionalism. This is certainly useful – would PBS do the same for American dance! – but I couldn’t help but wish for something more artistic, if not more challenging, something more trustworthy for the dance to justify myself.

Unsurprisingly, the dances themselves are a mixed bag. Almost all samplers are, and this one has a fast-forward option. What distinguishes here is the context of the pandemic: the common themes of loss, touch and limitation and how every work in this context strives for relevance.

The best program is the second, and not just because it includes the star pairing of Akram Khan and Natalia Osipova for the first time. His “Mud of Mourning: Touch” begins with the recited text: “Who will remember the story of touch?” And touch it. The fusion of his kathak contemporary style with her ballet results in a four-armed creature, part Shiva, part swan. This is noticeable, although more moving when she is dancing in a simple ballroom position and when she walks and his arms go empty.

The second program also includes part of “Hope Hunt and the Rise of Lazarus” by the erupting Belfast choreographer Oona Doherty. A woman rolls out of the car and poses like a working class man. The excerpt is cut off, but serves to introduce an important, original voice and to confirm its power, as the piece retains its power without the choreographer in the business card roll it created.

The second program is also representative of the presentation of strong hip-hop and weak ballet. “Lazuli Sky”, a new work by Will Tuckett for the Birmingham Royal Ballet, is fluid, conventionally pretty and perfectly normal. However, part of “Blak Whyte Gray,” a work by hip-hop troupe Boy Blue from 2017, is still urgent, a trio of precise robots, prisoners that evoke empathy like puppets.

And one piece “BLKDOG”, a work by Far From the Norm from 2018, is enough to establish his choreographer Botis Seva as a significant new talent. Hooded figures sit, tremble, run, fall. When they crouch down quickly, their knees butt and feet scurrying like a ballerina in Bourrées, this is the most piercing moment of the dance action in the entire festival.

For the strongest selection in the festival, “BLKDOG” competes with “Shades of Blue” by Matsena Productions, with which the third episode begins. Contemporary hip-hop also has its conventions, like the prison cells in this work of light and zombie movement. The image of a cop standing on a black man’s back is all too familiar. But the chaotic repetitions of protest and imprisonment capture one emotion of 2020 better than anything else in Dancing Nation. At the end a black man speaks in front of an empty auditorium. “Are you deaf?” he asks. The silence, he says, is terrifying.

Nothing else in the third program cuts through like this. Not Northern Ballet’s “States of Mind” with its hokey voice-over about pandemic loneliness and the healing power of love. Not Shobana Jeyasingh’s “Contagion”, a reminder of the Spanish flu of 1918 from 2018. And certainly not Rambert’s new “Rouge”, in which Marion Motin’s music video stagnates without music video editing.

The first episode is the weakest and the anomaly in the sense that the ballet is solid (Matthew Bourne’s “Spitfire,” a fun 1988 show of male vanity and lingerie ads) and that hip-hop is wispy (a trip through the Sadler’s) well construction, courtesy of Breakin ‘Convention).

Despite the flaws and limitations of Dancing Nation, a dance lover across an ocean from London can be grateful for it. It is too early to say whether such presentations will continue after the pandemic. When asked what is most needed, Jonzi D from Breakin ‘Convention responds with the hope that the audience will return to the theater and “experience real dance in the flesh”. Alistair Spalding’s answer? “Ticket sales.”

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Robert Cohan, 95, Dies; Exported Up to date Dance to Britain

Robert Cohan, 95, Dies; Exported Contemporary Dance to Britain

Robert Cohan, a New York born dancer and choreographer who changed the course of British dance by helping found a renowned contemporary dance company and school in London in the late 1960s, died there on January 13th. He was 95 years old.

His nephew Roy Vestrich confirmed the death.

Mr. Cohan’s journey to running the London company began in 1954 when, as a key member of the Martha Graham Company, he met Robin Howard in New York, a wealthy grandson of former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and a great fan of Graham’s work.

Almost a decade later, Mr. Howard sponsored a company trip to the Edinburgh Festival and a subsequent season in London, and was so encouraged by the success of the visit that he suggested Ms. Graham set up a studio there.

Mr. Cohan had taught at the Graham School although he had continued to dance with it, and both Mrs. Graham and Mr. Howard agreed that he should be the director of the London Outpost. In May 1966, in a studio on Berner’s Place near Oxford Street, Mr. Cohan began teaching Graham Technique – with an emphasis on weighted movements emanating from the spine and pelvis.

Over the next year, in a 2019 interview with The Guardian, Mr. Cohan said he and Mr. Howard spoke “every night with good wine” about expanding the company and finding a permanent home for it.

They settled in a former British Army drilling hall near Euston Station in central London and called it The Place to house both a school and a new company they founded, the London Contemporary Dance Group, later London Contemporary Dance Theater to accommodate.

The company debuted in 1969 at the Adeline Genée Theater in East Grinstead, Sussex, south of London, and received good critical reviews. Mr. Cohan, who commuted between New York and London while continuing to perform with the Graham Company, decided to devote himself exclusively to the British company.

The London company initially performed pieces from the works of Graham and other choreographers, but Mr. Cohan soon decided that in future they would only offer works that had been specially created for their dancers. As part of this new policy, The Place became a greenhouse for nurturing local talent and spawned major choreographers such as Richard Alston, Siobhan Davies, Darshan Singh Buller, Robert North and Aletta Collins.

The company toured the UK under Mr. Cohan, exposing audiences to contemporary dance for the first time in many cases.

“He started a school, founded a company, introduced the Graham technique in the UK, choreographed and bred a new generation of modern dance style choreographers, and promoted a contemporary dance boom in the 1970s,” said Debra Craine, chief executive officer Dancer critic of the London Times said in an interview. “Its importance and influence are almost incalculable.”

Handsome and charismatic, with long hair and the platform shoes that were trendy in the late 1960s and 1970s, Mr Cohan made The Place a creative hub not only for dancers and choreographers, but also for musicians, artists and filmmakers with common interests in dance. Composer Peter Maxwell Davies, photographer Anthony Crickmay and filmmaker Bob Lockyer, who recorded a number of Mr. Cohan’s dances for the BBC, were among the artists in Mr. Cohan’s circle.

Mr. Cohan was a prolific choreographer whose work was popular with audiences. Perhaps his most important piece was “Cell” (1969), which was created with two of his frequent collaborators, the designer Norbert Chiesa and the lighting designer John B. Read, and based on Richard Lloyd’s music. He encouraged his dancers to work on both experimental and mainstream creations.

The London Contemporary Dance Theater gave its first American tour in July 1977. “During the two-day debut engagement of this young British company at the American Dance Festival, there was never a dull moment,” wrote Anna Kisselgoff in the New York Times in her review from New London, Connecticut, in which Mr. Cohan as “the highly individual choreographer of unusual scope and depth “.

Allen Robertson and Donald Hutera wrote in their authoritative survey “The Dance Handbook” in 1989 that Mr. Cohan’s “pragmatic commitment to promoting dance and nurturing new talent in Britain was as important as the work of Ninette de Valois and Marie Rambert” , the founders of the Royal Ballet and Ballet Rambert.

Robert Paul Cohan was born in Manhattan on March 26, 1925. (Arrived just before midnight, he had an official birth date of March 27th, shared his family so he could later say he had two birthdays and was happy to celebrate both.) He was the eldest of three children from Walter and Billie (Osheyack) Cohan and grew up in Brooklyn. His mother worked for the US Postal Service and his father was a printer.

Robert took dance classes from a young age and was a fan of Fred Astaire, but he wasn’t seriously interested in dance until he was transferred to the UK to develop technical skills as part of the Army Specialized Training Program during World War II.

In London he saw Sadler’s Wells Ballet (the forerunner of the Royal Ballet) perform Robert Helpmann’s “Miracle in the Gorbals”. Inspired by this experience, he began his education at the Martha Graham School after leaving the army in 1946.

“I had this revelation,” he said in the Guardian interview, “that I would do it for the rest of my life.” His decision to turn down a job with the Veterans Administration and become a dancer sparked a two-year conflict with his family.

Within a few months, Graham had asked him to join their company, and he was soon one of their regular partners. Mr. Cohan’s appearance as Poetic Lover in Graham’s Deaths and Entrances “gave new meaning to the whole work,” wrote John Martin in a Times review. He added, “He dances admirably and acts with an engaging simplicity.”

When the Graham Company was not performing, Mr. Cohan danced on Broadway in the musicals “Shangri-La” and “Can-Can” and in 1957 worked in cabaret in Cuba with Jack Cole’s jazz dance company. (He described the experience as dancing “in a G-string for the mafia. ”)

Mr. Cohan began choreographing in the early 1950s and made his debut at the American Dance Festival with the solo “Perchance to Dream”. He wanted to teach and choreograph independently and left the Graham company in 1957, which infuriated Graham. According to one report, she scratched his back with her nails when they parted; Not a weakling, he should have scratched her back.

In 1962 he returned to the company, although in the same year he founded his own small troupe and from 1961 to 1965 headed the dance department of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

In 1966, Mr. Cohan became co-director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, and he continued to dance with it until he officially left in 1969 when he dedicated himself to his role as director of the school and company at The Place.

In the next two decades he created more than 30 works for the London Contemporary Dance Theater, including “Stages” (1971), “Stabat Mater” (1975), Nympheas (1976) and “The Phantasmagoria” (1987) working for the dance companies Batsheva and Bat-Dor in Israel.

However, its success in generating a new contemporary dance audience in the UK, as well as new groups of choreographers, dancers and companies in the genre, meant that the London Contemporary Dance Theater now had to compete for funding in a far more diverse and crowded sector, as well the International Dance Umbrella Festival in London.

Mr. Cohan resigned from the company in 1989, returned to head the company in 1992 and left the company in 1994 in a dispute with the British Arts Council, the company’s main funding agency. The company was later wound up and a new downsized force from Mr. Alston took its place.

Mr. Cohan retired to a farmhouse in the Cevennes region in south-central France and restored it and shared it with his colleague, Mr. Chiesa. He continued to choreograph for the Scottish Ballet and the Yorke Dance Project, for which he created a series of solos via Zoom last year during the pandemic.

He became a British citizen in 1989 and knighted in 2019

In addition to Mr. Vestrich, his nephew, his nieces Lee and Lesley Vestrich and their children and grandchildren, Mr. Cohan, survive.

When asked in 2019 if he wanted to continue choreographing, Mr. Cohan replied: “Absolutely. That’s what I live for. “

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Sunil Kothari, Eminent Scholar of Indian Dance, Dies at 87

Sunil Kothari, Eminent Scholar of Indian Dance, Dies at 87

Few critics or historians have been as central to the performing arts as Sunil Kothari has been to the world of traditional Indian dance. As a critic, scholar and teacher of youthful energy, he explored India’s rich dance spectrum in at least a dozen books. Choreographers and dancers across the country met him both as an authority and as a friend.

He died on December 27 at the age of 87 at the Fortis Escorts Heart Institute in Delhi. Three weeks earlier He had announced on social media that he had Covid-19 but had recovered. Shortly after his release, he suffered cardiac arrest and was taken to the hospital.

Mr. Kothari, who lectured frequently in the United States, studied the traditions and techniques of dance forms from north India south and east to west and interviewed hundreds of gurus, many of whom in a country that remains largely ethnocentric, declined his efforts to because he didn’t speak their national language.

“He worked hard,” wrote Maya Kulkarni Chadda, his longtime friend and Indian scholar, in an email, “with no money, no real support and no encouragement.”

Even so, he made progress and lived in extreme simplicity while working as a dance critic for The Times of India for over three decades. As he told The Hindu newspaper in 2016, he discovered India through his research. He also helped India discover itself. In his books, each examining one Indian dance genre – Bharatanatyam, Chhau, Kathak, Kuchipudi, Odissi and Sattriya – he opened up a different facet of Indian society and history.

Studying the languages, rhythms, and traditions of each genre was no easy task. Bharatanatyam, for example, existed in the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu in two forms: the traditional one, passed down by the temple dancers and developed by the dancer Balasaraswati; and the relatively new academic system developed by dancer Rukmini Devi Arundale in Chennai.

Although the two styles were often at odds, Mr. Kothari admired and drew both in books and conversed with both Balasaraswati and Devi. He also followed developments that opened the older genre to new sociological and feminist thinking, as well as yoga.

Sunil Manilal Kothari was born on December 20, 1933 in the Kheda district of Gujarat on the west coast of India as the youngest of ten children of Dahiben and Manilal Kothari into a middle-class family.

In the 1940s the family moved to Mumbai, where Mr. Kothari began studying the Kathak at the age of 10, one of India’s eight classical dance genres that combines Muslim and Hindu elements, statuary poses, quick turns and sudden stops to create brilliant musical resonance .

As in most other classical Indian genres, the movements in Kathak are performed barefoot, with straps of tiny bells attached to the ankles and eloquent use of the face, eyes, hands and torso.

Sunil was 13 years old when India became an independent nation in August 1947. When the country rediscovered itself in a post-colonial era, Mr. Kothari observed its cultural developments in dance. A polymath full of literature, film, and other genres, he loved dance both for its own sake and because of its deep connections to the religion, philosophy, scripture, and music of India.

However, his professional training was initially in accounting. He taught at Sydenham College of Commerce and Economics in Mumbai for several years in order to make lasting friends while maintaining his fascination with the dance forms of India.

After Mr. Kothari’s death, the writer Salil Tripathi, a long-time friend from the period who later moved to New York, wrote in homage: “He taught bookkeeping because he knew how to do it; He celebrated dance because he wanted to. “

When Mr. Kothari gave up accounting for dance writing, the decision went against his father’s will. He graduated with a Masters degree in 1964 and began publishing serious dance research four years later.

His subsequent research led him not only to travel through India with a British Council Fellowship and other cities, but also to London to broaden his horizons. By 1970 he became a dance critic for the Times of India and held that position until the beginning of the 21st century.

In 1977, Mr. Kothari obtained his doctorate. at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, with a focus on the dance drama traditions of South India and the ancient dance manual Natyashastra. He was awarded a Doctor of Letters by Rabindra Bharti University for his research on dance sculpture in the medieval temples of North Gujarat.

His scholarship was rewarded with a number of academic offices and a 2005 Fulbright scholarship. He was a member of UNESCO’s International Dance Council.

In the West, Mr. Kothari had encounters with dance figures such as Rudolf Nureyev, the choreographers Pina Bausch and Maurice Béjart, and the British theater director Peter Brook. As a frequent lecturer in the United States, he made his last trip to New York City in May 2019 when he spoke at the New York Public Library about mid-20th century dance greats Ram Gopal and Mrinalini Sarabhai. He carried his expertise easily and often spoke with an innocent-sounding delight.

Information about his survivors was not immediately available.

By the time of his death, Mr. Kothari had completed an autobiography that has yet to be published.

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There’s Dance All Over, No Matter The place You Look

There’s Dance All Over, No Matter Where You Look

Live dancing may largely be put on hold, but there is still beauty and catharsis outside the theater, in the movements we encounter every day. We asked four photographers to show us how people physically navigate a world where awareness of our bodies – how much space we occupy, whether we are six feet from our neighbor – has become the norm.

Camilo Fuentealba staked New York’s hottest club – Costco – in addition to local businesses in town where locals shop for essentials. “I decided to investigate how we move in these routine places and how we move to document the daily rituals we must attend to survive,” he said.

“During the quarantine, supermarkets, along with a handful of other places, were the center of the universe, a holdover from reality. They were the only walls in which we were allowed – sometimes forced – to be around strangers. “

Jillian Freyer photographed her sister and mother’s quarantine in the backyard of her mother’s Connecticut home. “I am drawn to the fragments between the productions,” she said, “when people are open and vulnerable and move between the moments with ease.”

“The way we move around has changed over the past year. Indoor spaces look claustrophobic and our outdoor spaces aren’t big enough. Backyards and gardens have been reinvented into hideaways,” she said. “We have become resourceful and grateful for the places we occupy and with them.”

“Those otherwise little moments when the laundry is hung up, hugged, and moved around in the backyard – they suddenly have to be something more significant.”

Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet stationed himself in Manhattan’s touristy areas during the holidays. “I enjoy capturing those fractions of a second of movement,” she said. “At some point, reality in photography can suddenly become surreal.”

Noah Sahady captured the harmony of climbers and nature in the San Bernardino National Forest: Climbing, he said, takes him to environments where loneliness doesn’t feel so out of place.

“I think there is so much nuance, beauty, and tension in the movement of climbing, especially in the intricacies of how hands and fingers can interact with rock,” he said, “or to complement the environment, but also to deteriorate it.”

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The Royal Academy of Dance: From Music Corridor to Ballet Royalty

The Royal Academy of Dance: From Music Hall to Ballet Royalty

“It is utter nonsense to say that the English temperament is unsuitable for dancing,” said Edouard Espinosa, a London dance instructor, in 1916. It was just a lack of qualified instruction that prevented the creation of “perfect dancers”. ”Espinosa spoke to a reporter from Lady’s Pictorial about an uproar he had caused in the dance world with this idea: dance teachers should adhere to standards and be screened for their work.

Four years later, in 1920, Espinosa and several others, including Danish-born Adeline Genée and Russian ballerina Tamara Karsavina, founded a teaching organization that would become the Royal Academy of Dance (RAD). Today the academy is one of the largest ballet education programs in the world. Students in 92 countries follow the curriculum and take their exams, which are regulated by the organization. And as the exhibition “On Point: Royal Academy of Dance at 100” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London shows, its history is synonymous with the history of ballet in Great Britain.

“Much of the legacy of British dance began with the RAD,” said Darcey Bussell, a former Royal Ballet ballerina who has served as the academy’s president since 2012. “It is important that dance training and instruction are closely linked to the professional world. The RAD has done this from the start.”

When the Royal Academy was founded, there was no national ballet company in Britain. But there was a lot of ballet, said Jane Pritchard, the curator of dance, theater, and performance at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She curated the exhibition with Eleanor Fitzpatrick, the archive and archive manager of the Royal Academy of Dance. “The Ballets Russes were there, Pavlova performed in London and excellent emigrant teachers came,” said Ms. Pritchard. “So the RAD was born at just the right moment, using the best of the Italian, French and Russian schools to create a British style that it then sent back to the world.”

The exhibition, which runs until September 2021, opened in May due to Covid-19 restrictions. It opened on December 2nd but closed again when the UK re-introduced restrictions in mid-December. While we wait for the museum to reopen, here’s a tour of some of the exhibition’s photographs, designs, and objects that touch on some of the most important figures in 20th century ballet history.

Adeline Genée (1878-1970), who spent much of her career in England, reigned as prima ballerina at the Empire Theater for a decade, appearing on various programs. She was both revered as a classical dancer and very popular with the public. Florence Ziegfeld called her “The World’s Greatest Dancer” when she performed in the USA in 1907. Genée became the first female president of the Royal Academy of Dance, and her royal connections and popularity with the public made her a formidable figurehead.

The photo from 1915 shows Genée in her own short ballet “A Dream of Butterflies and Roses” in a costume by Wilhelm, the resident designer at the Empire Theater and an important figure in the theater scene. “It’s a really good example of the type of costume and type of ballets that were being shown at the time,” said Ms. Fitzpatrick. “Ballet was still part of the music hall entertainment.”

This 1922 weekly vaudeville poster in the Coliseum of London shows how ballet was seen at the time the Royal Academy of Dance was founded. “It was part of a bigger picture, and it shows it visually,” said Ms. Pritchard. “Sybil Thorndike was a great British actress and would have given a brief performance of a play or monologue. Grock was a very famous clown. Most of the Colosseum’s bills had some sort of dance element, but it wasn’t always ballet. “

Jumping Joan was one of three characters that Tamara Karsavina danced in “Nursery Rhymes”, which she choreographed to music by Schubert for an evening at the Coliseum Theater in London in 1921. Unusually for ballet at the time in London, it was a standalone show rather than part of a variety program. Karsavina and her company did it twice a day for two weeks.

“People associate Karsavina with the Ballets Russes, but they also had their own group of dancers who performed regularly at the Colosseum,” Ms. Pritchard said. “She was really an independent artist in a way that we think is very modern, who works with a large company, but also has an independent existence.”

She also tried to promote British artists; The costume design is by Claud Lovat Fraser, a brilliant theater designer who died in his early 30s. “I think Lovat Fraser is the British equivalent of Bakst,” said Ms. Pritchard. “His drawings are so animated and precise, and he uses color wonderfully to create a sense of character.”

In 1954 the Whip and Carrot Club, an association of high jumpers, approached the Royal Academy of Dance with an unusual request. Members had read that athletes in both Russia and America had benefited from ballet lessons, and they asked the academy to formulate lessons that would improve their height.

The result was a multi-year course with courses for high jumpers and hurdlers and later for “obstacle hunters, discus and javelin throwers”, as can be seen from a Pathé film clip that is shown in the exhibition. In 1955, a leaflet containing 13 exercises for jumping was produced, drawn by cartoonist Cyril Kenneth Bird, professionally known as Fougasse, best known for government propaganda posters (“Careless Talk Costs Lives”) made during World War II .

“I love the photo of Margot Fonteyn watching in her fur coat!” Said Mrs. Pritchard.

Karsavina, until 1955 Vice President of the Royal Academy of Dance, developed a curriculum for teacher training and other sections of the advanced exams. As a dancer, she created the title role in Mikhail Fokine’s “The Firebird” with music by Stravinsky when the Ballets Russes performed the ballet at the Paris Opera in 1910. Here she is shown coaching Margot Fonteyn when the Royal Ballet first staged the ballet in 1954, the year Fonteyn took over from Genée as President of the Royal Academy of Dance.

“Karsavina knew firsthand what the choreographer and composer wanted and is passing it on,” said Ms. Fitzpatrick. (“I was never someone who counted,” says Karsavina in a film about learning “The Firebird”. “Stravinsky was very nice.”) “It gives a wonderful feeling of passing things on from one generation to the next.”

This relaxed moment of a rehearsal from 1963 shows the ease and the relationship between Fonteyn and the young Rudolf Nureyev, who had left Russia two years earlier. They were rehearsing for the Royal Academy of Dance’s annual gala, which Fonteyn had launched to raise funds for the organization. Her fame allowed her to bring together international guests, British dancers and even contemporary dance choreographers like Paul Taylor.

“The gala was also an opportunity for Fonteyn and Nureyev to try things that they might not have danced with the Royal Ballet,” said Ms. Pritchard. “Here they were rehearsing for ‘La Sylphide’ because Nureyev was passionate about the Bournonville choreography. They really look like two dancers who are happy together. “

Stanislas Idzikowski, known to his students as Idzi, was a Polish dancer who moved to London as a teenager and danced with Anna Pavlova’s company before joining the Ballets Russes, where he inherited many roles from Vaslav Nijinsky. A close friend of Karsavina, he later became a popular teacher and worked closely with the Royal Academy of Dance. Always formally dressed in a three-piece suit with a stiff collared shirt and sleek shoes, he was “tiny, elegant and precise,” according to Fonteyn in her autobiography.

In this 1952 photo, he is teaching fifth-year girls who may have been hoping for a career. Idzikowski was also a member of the Royal Academy of Dance’s Production Club, which was founded in 1932 to allow students over the age of 14 to work with choreographers. Frederick Ashton and Robert Helpmann were among the early volunteers, and later a young John Cranko created his first job there.

This 1972 photo of young girls about to begin a sequence called “Party Polka” was taken by Fonteyn’s brother Felix, who was also filming a group of elementary school students demonstrating for Fonteyn and other teachers. The footage, which was kept in canisters labeled “Children’s Curriculum” in the archives of the Royal Academy of Dance, was recently discovered by Ms. Fitzpatrick.

The film offers a rare glimpse into Fonteyn in her offstage role at the Royal Academy of Dance, Ms. Fitzgerald said, and reflects an important change the ballerina made during her presidency. “People really think about Fonteyn as a dancer, but she has been very involved in teaching and curriculum development,” said Ms. Fitzpatrick. Previous curricula, she explained, included pantomime, drama, and history, but when a body including Fonteyn revised the program in 1968, much of it was scrapped.

“They wanted to streamline everything and make it more comfortable for the kids and just focus on movement,” said Ms. Fitzpatrick. “The party polka is a great example of having a great feel for the kids to swirl around the room and really dance.”

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Entertainment

A Choreographer and Her Women Retell a Tragedy By means of Dance

A Choreographer and Her Girls Retell a Tragedy Through Dance

For the choreographer Tiffany Rae, dance is a language that is deeper and clearer than words. “I can show you better with dance what I have to say than actually talk,” she said in a recent interview. “You will understand how I feel.”

Part of what drives Ms. Rae – aside from her innate love of dance – is exploring issues rooted in social justice and black culture. Dance is a way to demonstrate both artistry and activism, and last summer she did both during a protest at Borough Hall in Brooklyn, where she preferred to dance than talk, and to her surprise, the crowd paid attention.

“Everyone sat down,” she said. “We didn’t even have to ask. It was just amazing – thousands of people sat down for everyone to see. “

At the protest, Ms. Rae, 24, presented a version of “Underground” that explores the trauma resulting from the struggle for racial equality and the continuing cycle of pain in black communities. She said, “The power that we had in our hands, in our faces – there was a kind of silence for everyone to say, OK, this is the time to focus, this is the time to listen.”

Gillian Walsh, a contemporary dance artist who interviewed Ms. Rae for Movement Research’s online publication Critical Correspondence, wrote, “Seeing this dance unexpectedly, so seamless between people making speeches and marching, really set me on fire.”

Ms. Rae, who grew up primarily in Brooklyn, has also created videos on Instagram and YouTube, some political and others for fun, such as The Parkers, her jubilant homage to the television series. Intended as a Thanksgiving gift for her followers, it went viral; Missy Elliott, whose music is featured, has republished it.

Her latest Rae Beast production, Unearth Birmingham, is more urgent: a response to the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1963. Four young girls were killed and many others injured. Ms. Rae’s film, shot in Gymnopedie, the basement of Bushwick United Methodist Church in Brooklyn, brings girls’ perspectives to life through an inventive, lively dance floor – full of hip-hop, modern, jazz and moments of improvisation – and music beginning with Cheryl Lynn’s “Got to Be Real” and ending with Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”.

14-year-old Naomi Southwell, who portrays one of the late girls, Cynthia Wesley, knew nothing about the Birmingham bombings before the project began. Ms. Rae let the girls see Spike Lee’s documentary “4 Little Girls” (1997), but her own narrative is more impressionistic than linear.

“She wanted to show people history through our movement,” said Ms. Southwell, a freshman at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music, Arts, and the Performing Arts. “She wanted us to express how we might have felt if we were these four little girls, if we were in their shoes.”

Towards the end, the four girls find themselves in a place they have never been to: a gym. Startled and confused, they stand close together as more young dancers enter, some dressed as schoolgirls (from the Dancers Dreamzzz studio where Ms. Rae teaches) while others cheerleaders with the Brooklyn Diamonds (which Ms. Rae was once a part of). . “The other girls come around,” said Mrs. Southwell, “trying to comfort us and show us that we will be fine.”

And then they all dance, superimposing shapes that reflect Ms. Rae’s eclectic background. She has trained in many genres including ballet, jazz, modern, West Africa, Horton, and hip hop. Thanks to cheerleading, she can move large groups.

And there is something else: she was the only player on the soccer team in middle school. (She was a cheerleader and soccer player at the same time for a while.) “I feel like soccer helped me be a strength dancer,” she said. “To dance softly and subtly, but still have that power behind it. ”

Her first time in a music video was Beyoncé’s “Let’s Move Your Body”. She was in elementary school. “Instead of paying attention to the dancing mostly, I was paying attention to what they were doing,” she said. “I would watch the choreographer.”

Now young girls are watching them. In a recent interview, Ms. Rae spoke about the Birmingham bombing, why it was important to show the innocence of her cast and how joy wins in the end.

What follows are edited excerpts from this conversation.

When did you first find out about the bombings and how did it affect you?

When I was little, I actually played one of the girls in one piece. It always resonated in my heart and I wanted to do something on my own.

That moment triggered so much. After this bombing, there was unrest – just like today. Even then, people who were racist, they realized: Oh my god, these are four innocent children. I have the feeling that this triggered the turning point a little.

I like the way your video jumps between grief and boisterous dancing.

I want you to know these girls are alive. Not to make it so sad, but to show the brightness at the end of this tunnel. I wanted to show that these are young girls; You have fun. Like they could have, but it was taken away. I always wanted to grab feelings.

I thought of studies that talked about how black girls are perceived as less innocent and more adult than other girls their age. Was that part of it too?

Yes / Yes! It’s so important. That’s why I made her so funny. And of course they did that themselves – these kids are really fun and full of energy and they are really girly girls. And innocent.

How did you develop the choreography?

I had to make sure I knew every single girl – her character. I don’t like to force choreography. I don’t have to take a thousand steps, but I want to do choreography, not just for the dancer’s eye, but for normal, everyday people so that they can feel what they are feeling.

Sometimes you don’t have to do everything so technically because the message doesn’t appear. So I knew I just had to be any girl. I’m fine – it has to be our turn here or she has to jump here. Or that has to be a kick. OK: what am I feeling?

You ask yourself

Sometimes I just have to sit back and not be a dancer for a while and just be a normal person. So sometimes it’s good for me to be on the train and just listen to music and just say, OK, if I wasn’t a dancer and I saw a show, what do I want to see? What do i want to feel And how can this movement relate to what I could convey? I think that’s how I was able to create this choreography.

How did you come up with group dance in the gym?

I knew I wanted something simple but loving. Something that would be simple but subtle. We don’t have to be sad forever. We have to grow and move forward. They look down on us and they shine. And it’s like we’re dancing That’s the point I’m trying to make. Dance is everything.