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 today we’ll get started with a headline rundown that features a lawsuit against a major modern dance company, dance-world reactions to Jennifer Homan’s just published biography of George Balanchine, and Playbill‘s departure from Twitter. Then we’ll talk about two recent interviews with the generally kind of interview-shy Mikhail Baryshnikov, who had interesting things to say about the role of art in a time of war, the future of ballet and Russia and Ukraine, and how he feels about the state of ballet more generally.
First though, I hope you’ve all been able to listen to our new long-form interview episodes, which are now alternating with these headline rundown episodes. They’re coming out every other Thursday. Last week we had just the best interview with a choreographer and dancer and actor and musician Toni Basil, an icon if ever there were one. Next week, actually on Wednesday—one day early, since it’s Thanksgiving week—we’ll have a special conversation with current Ballet Hispánico leader Eduardo Vilaro, and then the company’s former longtime executive director Verdery Roosevelt. And they talk about how they’re maintaining and building on the legacy of company founder Tina Ramirez, another absolute dance legend, who recently passed away. I hope you can tune in for that.
And if you’re enjoying the new format, by the way, please do take a minute to leave us a rating or a review on your listening platform of choice, because we really appreciate all of your feedback. Truly we do.
All right, now let’s get started on this not all that long, but rather substantial headline rundown list.
Lydia Murray:
A costume designer has filed a lawsuit against the Paul Taylor Dance Company alleging that the company discriminated against her because she’s a mother.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah, we have a link to the New York Times report in that in the show notes—a complicated one.
Over in the ballet world, historian and critic Jennifer Homans’ long-awaited book about George Balanchine, called Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century, just came out. As expected, it has sparked a lot of conversation. There have been reviews aplenty; most have noted that while Homans is certainly an ardent Balanchine admirer, the book is not a hagiography. It is pretty candid about Balanchine’s cruelty, especially toward the women in his company. Full disclosure here, I’m about halfway through this book myself. My first impressions were that, wow, it features a staggering amount of research, first of all, and some truly beautiful writing about Balanchine’s ballets. But yeah, you also definitely feel the tension between her reverence for Balanchine’s art, and then her descriptions of his failings as a person. Anyway, that kind of contextualization is always complicated, but the book is worth reading and so is a lot of the coverage about it, some of which we have linked to in the show notes.
Lydia Murray:
Bob Fosse’s Dancin’ is set to return to Broadway next year. Performances will begin March 2nd, 2023, and opening night is scheduled for March 19th. The production will recreate Fosse’s original Tony winning choreography, and Tony winner and Dancin’ original Broadway cast member Wayne Cilento is directing and providing musical staging.
Margaret Fuhrer:
I’m so glad that’s coming to New York City. I’m hoping a lot of the cast from that Old Globe production transfers too, because that was such a great group of dancers. Ida Saki and Kolton Krouse and Khori Michelle Petinaud, it’s like, all stars.
Lydia Murray:
Agreed. Really great group of dancers.
Margaret Fuhrer:
In more Broadway news—Broadway transfer news—Shucked, a corn-themed musical comedy, is coming to the Nederlander Theater in March following its world premiere at Utah’s Pioneer Theater Company. Shucked features choreography by Sarah O’Gleby, who by the way also choreographed the new musical version of Almost Famous.
Lydia Murray:
Playbill has left Twitter, saying that the platform now blurs actual news and insidious rhetoric. The move comes after Twitter launched and then shortly thereafter suspended a program that allowed users to pay for a verification check mark, which led to confusion and misinformation.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Will we see more of these kinds of announcements from more arts organizations as time goes on? Maybe.
Lydia Murray:
Quite possibly.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Weird time to be on Twitter.
Next up on the rundown: Dance Data Project recently released a study looking at compensation for the artistic and executive directors of the largest 50 ballet and classically based companies in the U.S. And it found that during fiscal year 2020, those companies’ budgets dropped by an average of 9%, but executive and artistic director salaries actually increased. So information about fiscal year 2021 is not yet available, but it will be interesting to see how that year’s data looks, what happened to budgets and compensation as companies restarted life performances. The full report does have information about 2016 to 2019, as well as 2020. So it’s tons of useful info, and we’ve linked to it in the show notes.
Lydia Murray:
Lester McGrath, the executive director of the Royal New Zealand Ballet, has quit effective immediately. The company cited personal and career reassessment reasons in its recent announcement of McGrath’s resignation. According to the statement, board chairperson Dame Kerry Prendergast would take over his duties effective immediately.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Sort of a strange moment for this company, because that resignation announcement was sent just a few hours before it put out its big press release about its 70th anniversary season next year, and then that release didn’t mention McGrath at all, which is kind of mysterious. Then there’s also been some other turbulence at the company recently. We have a link to a story about the Lester McGrath News that does a good job sort of summing up the broader context in the show notes.
Happier news now, out of Pacific Northwest Ballet. The company has promoted six standout dancers to soloist. So congratulations to Madison Rayn Abeo, Dammiel Cruz-Garrido, Christopher D’Ariano, Amanda Morgan, Christian Poppe, and Leah Terada. That’s a much-needed bright spot on this list.
Lydia Murray:
Absolutely. Very well deserved and exciting promotions.
And now for a not-so-bright spot: Len Goodman is leaving the ballroom. The “Dancing with the Stars” head judge has announced his upcoming retirement from the show. Goodman was a judge on “Strictly Come Dancing,” which is a British version of “Dancing with the Stars,
before he joined the U.S.-based show when it began in 2005, and next week will be his final night of judging.
Margaret Fuhrer:
End of an era.
Lydia Murray:
End of an era indeed.
Margaret Fuhrer:
In dance science news, a recent study published in the journal Current Biology found that very low frequency vibrations, like low enough that they’re inaudible to humans, actually make people dance more. So, how did the researchers figure that out? Well, during a live EDM concert, they turned a speaker emitting those types of super low vibrations on and off, and then they measured how much concertgoers danced using motion capture headsets. It’s pretty wild that music you can’t even hear can make you want to dance. Or as NPR of all places put it, it really is all about that base. NPR getting its New York Post on. [laughter]
Lydia Murray:
Indeed. And the dance world has lost two very important figures. D.C. hand dance legend Lawrence Bradford died on September 26th age 78. D.C. hand dance is the fluid swing dance that is the official dance of the District of Columbia. In 1992, he founded Smooth and Easy Hand Dance Institute, a school that would specialize in the dance style, and there he taught roughly 15,000 students to dance.
We have also lost Joan Peters, who was one of only three people approved by Katherine Dunham as a certified master teacher, and she was the chairperson for Dunham Technique at the Ailey School for 44 years. Peters also taught at the Ailey Extension and at Ailey’s former program for the blind and visually impaired and the class for Deaf preschool and grade school students.
Both will be missed.
Margaret Fuhrer:
That’s the end of our headline run down this episode, but please also be sure to check out the Dance Media Events Calendar, because it has a lot more information about upcoming performances and auditions and also other dance world events we just don’t maybe have time to get to here on the podcast. So to see the full list and add your own events to it, head to dancemediacalendar.com.
All right, moving on now to our longer discussion segment, which we’re doing a little bit differently this episode: Rather than focusing on a particular topic that’s been in the news, we’re going to talk about two recent interviews with one of dance’s biggest stars.
So yesterday, the day you’re hearing this it will be yesterday, Mikhail Baryshnikov received the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Award from the UK’s Royal Academy of Dance. That’s RAD’s highest honor. And in the days leading up to the ceremony, Baryshnikov talked to our own Amy Brandt at Pointe magazine, and also to The Guardian‘s Lydnsey Winship. And both interviews were pretty wide ranging; when an artist of the stature is receiving this type of lifetime achievement award, there are always a lot of possible topics on the table. But there were a few common themes: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, what the war is doing to the ballet community, what continues to inspire him, and how he thinks ballet has changed or rather has not changed during his lifetime.
Lydia Murray:
For the Pointe story, Amy was so generous and gave us all an opportunity to help give our thoughts about what we should ask for this story. The question of the role that an artist can play in times of crisis was an important one. Even though he’s so respected, it still takes a lot of courage to speak against the Putin regime, and it’s been great to see him vocally supporting dancers who are taking a stand. And as he mentioned in the Guardian article, when he defected to Canada from the USSR in 1974, he viewed it as primarily an artistic choice. And that’s facing, I think, a lot of dancers right now. You want to further your career obviously, and you also want to make sure that you’re not supporting injustice. So that was interesting.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah, I think we talked on the podcast before about the earlier exchange between Baryshnikov and Alexei Ratmansky, who had at least initially some differences of opinion about what should be expected of artists during war time. Back in March, Baryshnikov had said that he didn’t think Russian artists should be punished for failing to speak out against Putin. Ratmansky had sort of pushed back, saying, no, there’s no excuse for not actively opposing the war. In these two more recent interviews, Baryshnikov sort of addressed the idea a little bit obliquely. He mentioned the extraordinary courage it takes to speak up, and then sort of in the same breath also quoted Alexei Navalny’s call for all good people to take action against evil. There’s a lot of subtlety, there’s a lot of nuance to his positions on these ideas, which makes sense; he’s an incredibly thoughtful artist.
I also thought his comments about the future of ballet in Ukraine and Russia were interesting. In the Pointe interview, he expressed a lot of hope that this terrible war will ultimately invigorate the arts in Ukraine, that it might lead to a great renaissance of Ukrainian ballet. And then for Russia, he painted a much bleaker picture saying that ballet will “need to be entirely reborn and rebuilt from the ground up, figuratively and literally.” Heavy stuff.
Lydia Murray:
Yes. And also it was interesting just to hear him speak a bit about dancers who are looking toward the future of their careers, the perspective that they can have. He mentioned that there’s still so much work to be done in whatever capacity it feels right to you. Some might continue by going into arts management, or by even just being an audience member. And that’s true. I mean, there’s always something to contribute. And he of course has done so much, he’s had such an incredible career and he has such a well-rounded, unique perspective on what it means to have the next chapter of your career as a dancer and how many possibilities there are.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah, it was interesting because in The Guardian, Lyndsey Winship asked him a question about how he’d seen ballet change since he came to the West, since he defected. And he actually said, besides the level of technique, which has jumped ahead by leaps and bounds, he didn’t think it had changed much. Which didn’t necessarily sound like an indictment in context, but saying it out loud here, it doesn’t feel great. It seems like Baryshnikov’s own interests have shifted away from ballet and outward in other directions, and that does make me wonder about how he sees the future of ballet itself. And maybe those kinds of statements are more reflections of a personal shift in perspective than anything else. But selfishly, I want him in ballet’s corner still, you know?
But I guess, sort of on a happier note—and to come back to what you were saying about the advice he was giving to dancers, that he was giving in Pointe to dancers who might be looking to other aspects of their career beyond performance or beyond ballet—I liked his quote on a similar note in The Guardian where he was talking about why he’s still excited, even today, to explore unfamiliar artistic territory. About how he’s…this continual, like, restlessness is what still drives him as an artist. So he said, “I like to put myself in vulnerable positions artistically. It’s exhilarating to try and overcome the natural insecurity and fear that comes with each new project. Chasing that unknown and finding a way to make it work keeps me focused and happy actually.” And as somebody who has a hard time pushing herself to chase unknowns, I want to print that out and tape it to my fridge.
Lydia Murray:
I thought the same thing. I’m sure that’s obviously never easy, I mean by definition, if you’re constantly putting yourself in vulnerable positions. I’m sure in some way it’s…when you have so much success in your past, maybe that can help you to have maybe a little bit more confidence in your ability to do something that’s a little bit of a stretch for you or something that’s new for you. But it’s still so interesting to hear someone who’s at that level talk a bit about how they continue to challenge themselves and how they continue to grow and to lean into that fear. I mean, everyone at every level of their career, I think, can have that sort of fear, insecurity, and how you cope with it, and whether you lean into it or whether you back away from it, is critical and it’s really interesting. So that was interesting to hear him kind of mention.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. Leaning into fear, finding courage, I guess, was really the through line to both interviews, to all of his answers. Both the Pointe interview and the Guardian interview are of course worth reading. And of course we have linked them both for you in the show notes.
All right. That’s it for us this week. Thanks everyone for joining. We’ll be back in two weeks for more discussion of the news that’s moving the dance world. Keep learning, keep advocating, and keep dancing.
Lydia Murray:
Bye everyone.