Margaret Fuhrer:
Hi, dance friends, and welcome to The Dance Edit Podcast. I’m Margaret Fuhrer.

Amy Brandt:
And I’m Amy Brandt.

Margaret Fuhrer:
We are editors at Dance Media, and in today’s episode, we will discuss an essay that asks whether dance is an adequate response to a social movement as huge and profound as Black Lives Matter. We will talk about the future of screendance, which so many artists and companies invested in during the pandemic, but which is at a pivotal moment now that live performances are beginning in earnest again. And, because it’s the Olympics, we will get into, first of all, why it can be frustrating for dance folks to watch figure skating, and then talk about the skaters who have transcended that frustration with their dance artistry. Really excited to get into that with you, Amy.

Amy Brandt:
Me too.

Margaret Fuhrer:
First though, just a reminder that there is a great new episode of The Dance Edit Extra, our premium audio interview series, out now on Apple Podcasts— it came out on Saturday. It features the brilliant Alicia Graf Mack talking about how she’s bringing all of her diverse experiences in the professional dance world, and well beyond the professional dance world, into her role as director of the dance division at Juilliard. She’s so smart, so thoughtful, and her talents span so many disciplines. It was really fascinating to hear her perspective on the challenges that dance in higher ed is facing right now, and how she’s meeting them. So please check out her episode. You can find it by searching for The Dance Edit Extra on Apple Podcasts, and we also have the direct link for you in the show notes.

Okay, now it’s time for a jam-packed dance headline rundown. Here we go.

Amy Brandt:
Okay. The Oscar nominations were announced yesterday and they include a familiar face. Ariana DeBose was nominated for best supporting actress for her amazing performance as Anita in West Side Story. Yay! We are super excited to see a dancer recognized. She’s the only cast member from the film who’s who’s being nominated for any of the acting awards, although West Side Story has been nominated for a bunch of other awards, including best picture, best director and best cinematography. So congratulations, Ariana. I really hope she wins.

Margaret Fuhrer:
It’s the best news. I mean, she’s already made history because she and Rita Moreno are the first actors of color and the first women to be nominated for playing the same character. And then if Ariana wins, they’ll be only the third pair of actors to both win for the same part—the other two being Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro for their work as Vito Corleone in The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, and then Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix both won for playing the Joker. But yeah, I hope she joins that list.

Big news coming out of the competition world: Gil Stroming, the founder of the dance entertainment company Break the Floor, is stepping down as CEO. The announcement comes following widespread allegations of sexual misconduct against some of the company’s well-known instructors. Head to the show notes for links with further information on that story.

Amy Brandt:
The Prix de Lausanne wrapped up last weekend with seven young dancers winning scholarships. There was also a bit of controversy on social media this year over the Prix’s all-white jury. Some people commented on their Instagram page, to which the competition responded with something along the lines of, “Unfortunately, there’s just not a lot of variety in ballet,” which did not go over well at all. That comment has since been deleted, and the Prix released a statement of apology on their Instagram page on Monday.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah, there was a lot of frustration and anger about that on social media, understandably. We have more links with more information in the show notes too.

The U.K.’s Northern Ballet has named Federico Bonelli, the Royal Ballet principal, its new artistic director. So there are two transitions in one there, with Bonelli leaving the Royal Ballet to take on this directorship. And Bonelli is replacing David Nixon, who led Northern Ballet for 21 years.

Amy Brandt:
Former America Ballet Theatre star Paloma Herrera has announced that she is leaving Argentina’s esteemed Teatro Colón, where she has been artistic director of its ballet company since 2017. She told La Nación that the company structure is unsustainable. Just a little background: Pointe did a story on this in 2017, when she first joined. It seems that the company has a lot of union protocols and protections. In 2017, at least, I know the retirement age for dancers was 65, and there were a lot of restrictions on casting and whatnot. So it does create some limitations as far as… I know that’s something that she had wanted to change, since younger dancers often aren’t getting opportunities for promotions or roles, and a lot of them leave. I think she’s quoted—in Spanish, but English translation, she says, “It has a body of 100 dancers, but only 50 dance.” No word on where she’s going or what she’ll do next, but…

Margaret Fuhrer:
Sounds like some complicated politics at play there.

There’s yet more dance world leadership news this week. Gibney has announced that it is expanding its leadership, with three new appointments inside the organization. So the whole of Gibney is still led by Gina Gibney, but Nigel Campbell will become the first Gibney Center artistic director, Amy Miller will be the organization’s first director of engagement, and Gilbert T Small II has been promoted to director of Gibney Company. So, Gibney continues its ongoing process of evolution that’s been happening for a few years now.

Amy Brandt:
The Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival announced its 2022 season. This year marks the festival’s 90th anniversary and also celebrates its return to the Ted Shawn Theatre, which is now the only indoor theater on the premises after a fire destroyed the Doris Duke Theatre two years ago. The season boasts performances by Kyle Abraham’s A.I.M, Ronald K. Brown’s EVIDENCE, Limón Dance Company, BODYTRAFFIC, New York City Ballet principals Taylor Stanley and Sara Mearns, Dormeshia, and so many more. Sounds like a very exciting season ahead.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah, lots to look forward to. I’m so glad they’ll be back in the Shawn this year.

The musical adaptation of the NBC show “Smash” is one step closer to Broadway, with a workshop planned for summer. It’s aiming for a Broadway opening in 2024, and choreographer Josh Bergasse, who also worked on the TV production, is on board for the project. So, start your dream casting now. I’m very curious to see what this will actually look like.

Amy Brandt:
A dance instructor in North Korea, along with several of her teenage students, has been arrested for teaching her class “capitalist” dance moves from foreign media. According to Radio Free Asia, authorities raided her studio and found a U.S. speed flash drive with foreign music and dance videos, which are often smuggled into North Korea and sold on the black market. She and the dancers are accused of violating the elimination of Reactionary Thought and Culture Act, which punishes people for watching media from capitalist countries like South Korea and the U.S. The maximum penalty is death. So, a pretty scary situation.

Margaret Fuhrer:
We have a link with more information about that in the show notes too.

We are on a rollercoaster ride in this headline rundown, as we often are. So, back to happy news: Nashville Ballet dancers will now wear tights and shoes that match their skin tones, rather than defaulting to ballet pink. That’s a transition that acknowledges that the tradition of pink tights and shoes is rooted in Eurocentric beauty standards. So, it’s a small change, but it’s a meaningful one.

Amy Brandt:
Yeah. And the dance world has lost three luminaries in recent weeks. Donald Mahler, who danced and choreographed for and eventually directed the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and who helped stage ballets by Antony Tudor, has died at age 88. I actually worked with Donald Mahler at Milwaukee Ballet years ago, for an all-Tudor program, so I was very sad to hear this news. Martial Roumain, choreographer, dancer, educator, actor, and executor of the works of choreographers Eleo Pomare and Joan Miller, recently passed away. And Joan Bayley, a Balanchine dancer and associate choreographer during MGM’s golden era, passed away on January 5th of this year, just a few months shy of her 102nd birthday.

Margaret Fuhrer:
In the Dance Magazine obituary, there are some just fantastic photos of her working on the set of White Christmas. I mean, what a legacy all of these artists had.

So, in our first longer discussion segment today, we’d like to talk about a piece that ran in Dance Magazine‘s February issue, and just went up online. It’s an essay by the multifaceted dance artist David Roussève, and it discusses whether dance can meaningfully address a movement as enormous as Black Lives Matter—about whether, in the face of something that urgent and that overwhelming, dance is enough. And that’s not a new question. It’s really the perennial question about dance and social justice and how and where they can and should meet. But Roussève has dedicated a lot of his career to exploring that intersection. And in his essay, he interrogates his own artistic responses to this current political moment—why making dance began to feel inadequate, and why he nevertheless kept making dance.

Amy Brandt:
As I was reading this essay, that was one thing that really struck me is as a dance creator, as someone who’s creating work, how heavy that must feel to create a work about something as important as Black Lives Matter and something that is probably quite personal to him. And how do you do it justice, where it can provoke thought and change and doesn’t just speak in an echo chamber or lean heavily on sentimentality? I mean, I can imagine that would be a lot to carry with you as you’re trying to shape this piece.

And I thought the essay was really interesting in how it was structured. It kind of starts in 2016 with this piece he created called Enough? that asks that very question: can dance meaningfully address these movements like Black Lives Matter? And then he kind of goes back in time to 1991, during the AIDS crisis, when he was creating another work, but then also participated in a large protest at Grand Central Terminal and he kind of… It’s like, we were getting attention from the people, but we weren’t receiving… The movement he was fighting for wasn’t receiving the empathy that it deserved. So he started looking for ways to achieve that in his work. And then in 2022 or 2020, looking back on it, he wasn’t sure if it still was enough.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. I like that he explained how the purpose of his political art-making has always been to create “bridges of empathy,” as he said, to let the disenfranchised tell their stories and allow viewers to see themselves in people who might have different experiences than they do. Which dance is especially good at doing that because it’s abstract, it’s metaphorical, so it can speak deeply to any viewer, no matter where they’re coming from. I mean, the universal power of dance—that’s something we talk about a lot.

And it’s not that the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement made any of that untrue. It’s that, as he says, the sheer scale of the despair and the anger of that movement, the force of it, made art for empathy’s sake feel less adequate. So yeah, so his response was to then explore those feelings in that piece called Enough?, to question the adequacy of his own response and then in doing so push the audience to question their own responses to this movement and whether they’ve been adequate. So he explains it as, instead of trying to create empathy for individuals, he was trying to create empathy for a political movement, to push people to action because they care not about a person or a group of people, but because they care about humanity more broadly.

I like that he didn’t draw any hard conclusions at the end of this piece. Because whether dance or any type of art is a sufficient response to a huge sociopolitical movement that demands meaningful action, that’s always going to be a question.

Amy Brandt:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). He also said something towards the end where it’s like, that’s for the audience to decide, but for himself as the artist, this is what he knows how to do best and from the heart. It’s a great essay.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. I hope you all have time to read it. Don’t rely on our paraphrasing of it. It is, of course, linked in the show notes.

Alrighty. Next up, we have another excellent Dance Magazine story. It’s a feature looking at what might become of screendance, of dance on film, now that live performances have returned in earnest. And we’ve talked a whole lot about screendance over the course of the pandemic, because for a while, it was the only type of dance that was really happening. But it’s important to note just how big a shift that was. Pre-pandemic, dance for the camera was really a marginalized form. It wasn’t getting a whole lot of money or attention or resources. So COVID led to this screendance boom, which in turn has led to new tools and innovations and creative discoveries and some new sources of funding. So, now what? Is this approach to screendance sustainable in the long term? And how are artists and audiences feeling about it at this point?

Amy Brandt:
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, since so many companies really and invested in online performance and transitioning to these digital platforms. I think a lot of companies want to focus on live performance again, but they know that having this option is important, especially with just the big question marks surrounding COVID and what the future is going to look like. But I also think it brought in different audiences, it provided a bit of security in a very insecure age.

I’m just wondering how much attention they will keep giving it, and investment, now that theaters are opening up again. It’s expensive. It involves technology, it involves getting funders on board and educating them. As this article clearly points out, one filmmaker was applying for a grant and the response was, “What is screen dance? I had to Google it.”

Margaret Fuhrer:
I know, jeez!

Amy Brandt:
But one thing that she talked about that I found interesting was how screen dance is finding momentum in educational circles and in studios and young people, university programs, performing arts high schools, that this is kind of being added on as part of the learning process, as well as learning just choreography for concert. And when you add that with these social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram already giving young dancers a platform to create, I’m wondering if this is something that will really build from the next generation on up as opposed to the current generation down.

Margaret Fuhrer:
That was the part of the article that really stood out to me too, was the fact that more and more young dancers are interested in screendance, particularly as it exists on social media, on TikTok and Instagram. Because filmed dance is going to be a native language for so many of these dancers in a way that it just wasn’t for previous generations. So yeah. What does that mean for the future of screendance? It seems like it bodes well.

I mean, it definitely seems like now that many more dance artists have experimented with dance on film, there’s greater respect for and understanding of screendance and the incredible amount of work and resources that it requires. So I think the fact that it’s beginning to be recognized as its own genre, a specific type of art-making, as opposed to like, “Well, if we can’t dance in a theater, maybe we’ll dance on camera”—that’s a good sign, that people are making that distinction.

I feel like the real question is, does that mean there’s going to be a longer-term funding structure to support that type of work? That’s the key to everything, as it so often is, resources. Anyway, there’s a ton to be said about this topic and much of it is said in Cara Hagan’s great piece for Dance Magazine, which we have linked for you on the show notes.

Amy Brandt:
Yeah. It really goes into depth—it’s a very in-depth article. She talks to a lot of different people.

Margaret Fuhrer:
It’s definitely worth a read.

All right. Finally today, we’ve got to talk for a few minutes about figure skating, which is having its big Olympic moment right now. Obviously figure skating is a very dance-oriented sport, so it’s unsurprising that a lot of us dance people are following these Olympians pretty closely. But as skating’s technical elements have become more and more difficult, its artistic side has sometimes felt like an afterthought, which can be frustrating to us dance folks. We don’t care as much about the quads—we want quality!

But when truly great skaters manage to balance high-level technique and high-level artistry, that can be so thrilling. And Laura Capelle wrote a great piece for Dance Magazine about the dance artistry of one skater in particular, Jason Brown. And actually, I’m just realizing, all three of our discussion topics this week came out of Dance Magazine. Yay, Dance Magazine!

Amy Brandt:
I love Jason Brown. Can I just say that?

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yep! Ditto.

Amy Brandt:
First and foremost, I stayed up very late the other night just to catch his performance, which was last in the short program, but I didn’t want to miss it and it was… And he certainly delivered. So it was all worth it, all worth the late night.

But it does make me sad that the artistic element of the sport is considered “lesser than” in the scoring system. And I’m wondering if it’s just the technical aspect is more easily scored in an objective way, but it kind of reminds me of just dance competitions where… What is more important? Is it more important to see a kid do a quadruple pirouette, not on the music, or a beautiful double or triple pirouette that lands on the music? To me, I’d prefer to see them land on the music, but…

Margaret Fuhrer:

“I said a clean double.” Yeah. [laughter] Yeah, what is the ultimate aim of this performance? What are you trying to accomplish?

Well, first of all, I wanted to call out for a second, some of the choreographers of these figure skating performances, like Jason Brown, the choreography official short program, Rohene Ward has a strong dance background and is so good at weaving in the big jumps in a way that feels effortless and musical and of a piece with everything else happening. I think Nathan Chen’s choreographer, or one of them, Shae-Lynn Bourne, I think she’s also really good at that. And fun fact, Shae-Lynn is also working with Chen’s archival, Yuzuru Hanyu. So that’s some really good special sauce there that actually might be making a difference with these top level skaters that have high level choreographers.

Amy Brandt:
And we should also mention that Nathan Chen has a very serious ballet background as well. He grew up at the Ballet West… I know he was at Fritz or something in the Ballet West Nutcracker years and years ago. So he certainly… While he is such a technician, he also has some serious dance chops too.

Margaret Fuhrer:
And you can see it. Yeah, for sure.

Amy Brandt:
Artistry chops.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Watching these performances, I’ve been thinking a lot about John Curry. Do you remember John Curry?

Amy Brandt:
Oh…I don’t know.

Margaret Fuhrer:
He was a figure skating Olympian, but he really brought dance and especially ballet influences into figure skating. He actually had an ice dancing company in the early ’80s that did pieces by Twyla Tharp and Kenneth McMillan. He was commissioning these ice dance pieces…

Amy Brandt:
Wow.

Margaret Fuhrer:
… from them. Yeah! There’s some great clips of that on YouTube, if you do a little digging.

Amy Brandt:
I did not know any of this.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Oh, go Google. It’s such a great rabbit hole to go down. But so, he posed the question, like, what if figure skating had never been a sport? What if it had evolved into a performance art instead of into a competitive thing? What aspects of it would we value? And thinking about what figure skating brings to the table that’s unique to skating, like, moving in a frictionless environment, and what you can do with it, and how the speed and the fluidity that that allows—what you can create using that. I think actually Elladj Baldé is doing something along those same lines today, bringing in not balletic influences, but hip hop influences, a whole different way of thinking about dancing on the ice.

Amy Brandt:
Well, yeah. And then that makes me wonder. I’ve never been to the Ice Capades or anything like that, but I mean, do these athletes have a future after their competitive years are done that is in just the pure artistic element of skating to skating as a performance art?

Margaret Fuhrer:
Exhibition skating, which is its own thing. Yeah.

Amy Brandt:
Yeah.

Margaret Fuhrer:
It’s funny too, because while I love the idea of exploring figure skating as pure performance, I also think there is something transcendent that happens when you get that rare competitor, like a Jason Brown, like a Nathan Chen, like a, going back further, Sasha Cohen or Michelle Kwan—I’m realizing we’re talking about all men today, which is not good—but that is performance on a different level. And figure skating probably wouldn’t have reached the technical heights it’s at today without the competitive system driving it in that direction.

Amy Brandt:
Yeah. That is true.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Man, we could talk about this for hours.

Amy Brandt:
I know.

Margaret Fuhrer:
We probably have to stop. [laughter] But I hope you can read Laura’s ode to Jason in particular, which is beautiful and is of course, linked for you in the show notes.

Amy Brandt:
With plenty of videos.

Margaret Fuhrer:
With plenty of videos, yes, blessedly!

All right. That’s it for us this week. Thanks everyone for joining us. We’ll be back next week for more discussion of the news that’s moving the dance world. Keep learning, keep advocating, and keep dancing.

Amy Brandt:
Bye, everybody.