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

Lydia Murray:
And I’m Lydia Murray.

Margaret Fuhrer:
We are editors at Dance Media. And in today’s episode, we’re going to kick things off with a headline rundown of both Ukraine-related and non-Ukraine-related items, including some news stories that take a big-picture view on how the Russian invasion has reshaped the dance world. Then we will discuss an excellent story by Laura Cappelle on how dance companies are beginning to use intimacy directors to safeguard the mental and physical health of their performers, especially when the choreography involves simulated sex or violence. And finally, we’ll talk about how a Mexican dance company is using the marketability of Cinco de Mayo as an opportunity to teach audiences about Mexican history and culture.

So, lots to talk about as always. Let’s get right into our jumbo-sized headline rundown.

Lydia Murray:
Marquee TV, which offers dance, theater, opera, and classical music on demand, is presenting Dance for Ukraine, which is a charity gala directed by former Royal Ballet stars Ivan Putrov and Alina Cojocaru. It was first performed live at the London Coliseum, and the film will be available for viewing through Sunday, April 24th.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yes, and in the show notes, we have a link to a Pointe magazine story that includes information on how to stream the gala, and then also the complete cast list, which is pretty fantastic.

Members of a Russian ballet company that’s been on tour since the invasion of Ukraine are reportedly afraid to return home. The St. Petersburg Festival Ballet, which is currently touring Europe, has been pretty vocal in its opposition to the war; it’s included a text condemning the invasion at the beginning of each of its performances. Now, some of its dancers, whose visas expire at the end of April, are fearful of what might happen when they get back to Russia. Some reportedly have plans to apply for political asylum.

And by the way, these artists are sort of getting hit from all sides, because some of their performances in Europe have seen protests or even been canceled because of the company’s perceived association with Russia. So it’s a large and complicated mess.

We wanted to tie this story, too, to a larger piece that the New York Times ran last week about what the ballet scene looks like inside Russia, and how it’s becoming sort of a sign of Russian isolation. The Bolshoi and the Mariinsky, after opening up to the outside world following the collapse of the Soviet Union, seem to be turning inward on themselves again. It feels like the descent of a new Iron Curtain, and artists everywhere are worse off for that. We’ve linked that Times piece in the show notes.

Lydia Murray:
The dance world continues to come together in support of Ukrainian dancers. The ballerina Kirsten Allen has collaborated with dancers in Europe to send tactical gear to those in Ukraine, and Youth America Grand Prix has been working to help Ukrainian dance students and their families and to place them in schools in other countries.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah, that’s the more hopeful side of the Ukraine story. Thank goodness, because we really need more hope on that front these days. We have links to stories about all of those efforts in the show notes.

All right, moving into non-Ukraine-related news now. Last Friday, the Broadway League announced that 41 Broadway theaters would stop checking the vaccination status of ticket holders after April 30, though all of them will continue to require that audience members wear masks inside theaters at least through May 31st. That change comes as many governments and businesses are loosening restrictions—and also as case counts continue to rise in New York City.

This was not a unanimous decision, by the way. Not every Broadway theater will drop the vaccine requirement. Two nonprofit landlords said they would keep it, another said it was still deciding. So there’s not much clarity here in terms of what the “best course” of action is for theaters right now.

Lydia Murray:
Moving forward is certainly complex these days.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lydia Murray:
An NFT of the popular meme known as “Coffin Dance,” which features Ghanaian pallbearers, has sold for approximately $990,934. The proceeds will be used to send financial aid to Ukrainians.

Margaret Fuhrer:
I mean, look, NFTs are wild, as we talked about last episode, but at least it’s for a good cause.

Lydia Murray:
Indeed.

Margaret Fuhrer:
New York City Ballet has announced its 2022 to ’23 season. The programming will include premieres by Kyle Abraham, Keerati Jinakunwiphat, Alysa Pires, Gianna Reisen, and Christopher Wheeldon, and also a full length premiere set to Aaron Copland by Justin Peck. And I’m also selfishly very sad to report that principal Sterling Hyltin is retiring this season. I am not ready for her to go yet. But her last performance will be as the Sugar Plum Fairy in The Nutcracker, which I thought was a kind of a beautiful and unusual choice.

Lydia Murray:
New York Theatre Ballet has named Steven Melendez as its new artistic director. Melendez will be welcomed at Legacy and Future, which is a benefit event celebrating NYTB on May 4th.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Congratulations to Steven. And he is taking the place of Diana Byer, the founding artistic director. Those are some large shoes to fill. She made New York Theatre Ballet into something really special. Another ballet changing of the guard—so many of those happening.

So, moving over to the entertainment world: we now know what Oscar-winning triple threat Ariana DeBose’s next project is. It was announced last week that DeBose will both star in and executive produce the film Two and Only, described as My Best Friend’s Wedding with a bisexual, Latinx point of view. Which, yep, count me in for that—that sounds amazing. Ariana as the Julia Roberts anti-heroine? I can’t wait to see that.

Lydia Murray:
I’m so excited for that.

The National Endowment for the Humanities recently announced $33.17 million in grants for 245 humanities projects across the country, including the digital preservation of performances, master classes, lectures, and oral histories from Jacob’s Pillow dance festival from 1992 through 2010.

Margaret Fuhrer:
And here’s some more good dance funding news. The Merce Cunningham Trust has announced an endowed scholarship at SUNY Purchase college. The scholarship will support an upper level dance student who is in danger of not finishing their studies due to financial pressure. And the scholarship is part of the trust’s recent efforts to both expand access to Cunningham’s work and also to support the young dance artists who will ultimately help carry on its legacy.

Lydia Murray:
The first weekend of Coachella recently happened and its dancing did not disappoint. Some highlights included Belgian line dancing from the pop band L’imperatice. And of course, Doja Cat performed her signature dynamic dancing choreographed by Ebony Williams and Fullout Cortland. And I will not fan girl, I promise.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Oh, feel free to fan girl. That Doja Cat performance was amazing. I also, I know this is not the danciest bit, but I don’t think our feeds will ever be free of Harry Styles and Shania Twain gifs—

Lydia Murray:
Oh, wow.

Margaret Fuhrer:
—from here to eternity. And I’m not sad about that. I’m totally okay with that.

Lydia Murray:
I am okay with that too. I was not expecting that, but it was exactly what I needed.

Margaret Fuhrer:
And we’re closing out our headline rundown today with an obituary for Ann Hutchinson Guest, a leading advocate of and expert on dance notation, who was one of the co-founders of the Dance Notation Bureau. In a really beautiful tribute, critic Deborah Jowitt called her the Queen of Dance Notation for all the work she did to help teach and promote the Labanotation system. Guest was 103. And we have Deborah Jowitt’s piece linked in the show notes.

Okay. So moving now into our longer discussion segments, which actually both center on New York Times articles this week. First up, we have a story by Laura Cappelle, doing great work as always, about intimacy directors in dance. A little more than a year ago, Dance Magazine ran a story by Zac Whittenberg about how intimacy coordinators could help dance—it was a mostly hypothetical idea at that point. And Zac’s story talked about how these experts had been used on TV and film sets to ensure that scenes requiring close physical contact were handled safely. And yeah, since close physical contact is pretty much always part of the job in dance, clearly those specialists could be beneficial to the dance community too. So, cut to 2022: Now ballet companies in particular are starting to bring in intimacy directors. Scottish Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, the National Ballet of Canada, and Rambert have all hired intimacy consultants to work on productions that have sensitive narratives or partnering. So let’s talk about what that looks like and why it’s important.

Lydia Murray:
So intimacy directors essentially bridge the gap between the safety and physicality of the dancers and the experiences of those dancers’ characters. An example of how this can look is in Scottish Ballet’s production of Mayerling, in which the character Stephanie is assaulted on her wedding night by her husband. The dancer who played her, Bethany Kingsley-Garner, hadn’t performed a role since giving birth the previous summer and felt anxious about being touched. So she received help from an intimacy director at the company who was able to coach her on how to take control by speaking with her partners and by building slowly to the more uncomfortable parts of the choreography. So the director’s job is to ensure that there’s informed consent, particularly with sexual or violent content, and support the artists’ emotional and physical wellbeing.

Margaret Fuhrer:
I mean, actually the gorgeous photos for this story, the New York Times story, actually tell a lot of the story. They show two Scottish Ballet dancers rehearsing one of the pas de deux from Mayerling, and the woman’s back is just covered in red marks from this rough skin-to-skin contact. It’s really striking.

Although actually, what first struck me about Laura’s piece was the context about ballet culture that she had to put in for your average non-dance-oriented New York Times reader. And it’s all things that we know already, but to see them all written out together, it still hits you.

Lydia Murray:
It’s jarring. Yes.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. The fact that ballet dancers have little power or agency. They’re expected to silently adapt to whatever’s asked of them. Their bodies aren’t seen as their own. They’re discouraged from speaking up when they’re uncomfortable. I mean… Oh, it makes your heart ache.

Lydia Murray:
I scrolled through some of the comments and I think some of the comments sort of reflected that idea of, “Well, that’s kind of what dancers signed up for. You have to be touched.” And yeah, that’s, of course, a problem.

And one thing I found interesting was the role of intimacy direction for the corps de ballet, as opposed to only the principals or soloists. The piece points out that the ensemble parts for ballets like Manon and Mayerling often involve heavy improvisation. Christopher Hamspon, who’s the director of Scottish Ballet, mentioned that when he was dancing, he saw some dancers cross boundaries in those kinds of improvised scenes that have darker thematic undertones, and women in the corps were considered difficult or troublemakers if they spoke out. At the beginning of your career, especially when you’re in the corps or you’re a student, you really can feel like you don’t have a say. You get the parts to you’re assigned. You want to do them to the best of your ability to prove yourself. And it really ties into a larger conversation about workers’ rights and power distribution in dance companies and how we protect our most vulnerable artists.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yep. Dancers are workers.

Another theme that sort of emerged in the comments on the story—which are an interesting place to live—there were a lot of people kind of yelling about the idea that intimacy direction was going to create rigid rules that would then limit creativity, this whole thing that dance is about. But in fact, most of the artists featured in the story said they found it liberating. It established a basis of trust and a series of boundaries that then freed up all of this mental and emotional space, so instead of worrying about how they’re touching and being touched, they could just dissolve into this character they were playing.

Lydia Murray:
Yeah. Intimacy work can also happen in coordination with a choreographer in the sense that, for example, in a piece with Dance Magazine last year, the choreographer Jack Ferver talked about building friendship and trust through communication in the rehearsal room and how that includes asking dancers what they’re comfortable with and including that in the choreography. And as the intimacy coordinator Sarah Lozoff pointed out, bodies tell stories. And when the movement is spontaneous in every performance, you’re not telling the best or most effective story. So choreography doesn’t need to be limited to the less intimate movement.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yep. I also just love the idea of closure practices, the little rituals that formalize the end of a work or performance session, this official detachment from whatever character was being played. They talked about using just a high five at the end of rehearsal, like, “Okay, high five. We are back now to being our non-character selves.”

Lydia Murray:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Margaret Fuhrer:
Which seemed like such a small thing, but such a potentially effective way to help dancers, who often talk about how they have trouble leaving their work in the studio because it does require so much physical and emotional investment.

Lydia Murray:
Right. Yeah. When you can kind of detach in that way, I think that’s really helpful too.

And it’s interesting how you can sort of experience different kinds of trauma related to your character or different kinds of distress related to your character in different ways, whether your character is suffering something horrible or whether your character needs to be the one who’s inflicting that upon someone else. The dancer who has to kind of be the aggressor in that assault scene was really distressed by having audiences need to see him in that way. And that’s something that working with the intimacy director was able to help with.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. We, of course, have links to both the New York Times piece and the Dance Magazine story in the show notes. Please do give them a read if you have time.

Finally today, we have a piece about a group that is telling the real story of Cinco de Mayo through dance. So, this weekend, Calpulli Mexican Dance Company, which was founded in 2003 by Alberto Lopez Herrera and Juan Castaño, is performing its original show Puebla: The Story of Cinco de Mayo at Chelsea Factory in New York City. And Brian Seibert wrote a piece for the Times about how the production capitalizes on a holiday that, in the United States, has become a big commercial event, but it uses that holiday’s marketability as a chance to direct attention to both the actual historical events of Cinco de Mayo, which are very complicated, and also to the culture of Mexico’s Puebla region. It sounds like both a savvy move and—neither of us has seen the production yet, but from the sounds of it—a creatively fruitful one.

Lydia Murray:
Yeah. There’s still a relatively common misconception that Cinco de Mayo is Mexican Independence Day, first of all, and that the way that it’s widely celebrated in the U.S. came from Mexico, and that’s not the case.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lydia Murray:
So here are some key points about the history of Cinco de Mayo in a nutshell, because it’s central to this production. So in 1861, Napoleon III sent French troops to invade Mexico after the Mexican president, Benito Juárez, suspended foreign debt payments. On May 5th, 1862 in Puebla, the Mexican army had a bit of a David and Goliath-reminiscent victory against the significantly larger French army. But the French later dominated, installing Maximilian I as emperor of Mexico. The Mexican Republic did not expel the French, execute Maximilian, and regain control of the country until several years later, in 1867. So Calpulli illustrates those roots of the holiday—not the commercialized version with the margaritas and wild parties—in a streamlined form in this show.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. And often, people associate folkloric dancing with sort of upbeat stories and a big family feeling. And it’s not that that’s not present in Calpulli’s production—they want everyone to fall in love with Mexican culture. But from the sounds of it, they also have a particular point of view, and not an entirely apolitical one. For example, sections of Puebla are openly critical of the Catholic church. And Lopez and Castaño said in the story that they knew that was an artistic risk, but they thought it was worth taking because, as Castaño said, folk dance doesn’t have to be “just happy people in beautiful costumes.”

Lydia Murray:
Right.

Margaret Fuhrer:
I like that they’re ambitious in their storytelling that way. And that carries through in some of their other productions as well. They have a production called Dia de Los Muertos, which has a trip-to-the-underworld storyline with hints of Giselle in it. They have a Mexican-American Christmas production that crosses Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker score with mariachi music and tells a story about children pulled between two cultures. I mean, there’s so much richness there.

Lydia Murray:
Yeah. In this piece, the villains are depicted as the Mexican elites, the Church, and the French, who are collaborating for power, as Castaño explained. And yeah, as Margaret just pointed out, such direct political commentary is somewhat unusual for a folkloric dance company. But I agree. The fact that it doesn’t shy away from that aspect of this history is part of what makes it so powerful.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah.

Lydia Murray:
There’s something really impactful about redirecting the attention and the momentum from an appropriated aspect of your culture to something that’s genuine and something that can deepen a sense of community.

Margaret Fuhrer:
Absolutely. We really just want to direct you, I mean, first of all, to the New York Times piece, but especially to the performances themselves, if you’re in or around the New York City area. All of the relevant links there are, of course, in the show notes.

All right, that’s it for us this week. Thanks everyone for joining. 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.

Lydia Murray:
Bye everyone.