Margaret Fuhrer:
Hi dance friends, and welcome to The Dance Edit podcast. I’m Margaret Fuhrer.
Courtney Escoyne:
And I’m Courtney Escoyne.
Margaret Fuhrer:
We are editors at Dance Media, back for another headline rundown episode. We will start with a collection of news items from the past couple of weeks, since our last headline roundup, including some news of our own, some news from Dance Media itself. And then we will slow down for a longer discussion of the type of story you hope never to report, the shooting on Lunar New Year’s Eve at California Star Ballroom Dance Studio that left 11 people dead. We want especially to talk about Star Ballroom, which has been a pillar in its Monterey Park community for decades, and a haven for older Chinese American immigrants in particular.
Before we get into the news, a quick call out for next week’s episode of the podcast, which will feature an interview with Ashton Edwards and Zsilas Michael Hughes, who are best friends and roommates and colleagues at Pacific Northwest Ballet. We had this beautiful conversation about how they’re helping each other navigate life as queer nonbinary dancers of color, and how they are helping the company rethink its approach to technique and casting, and so many of its conventional “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts.” So that episode will be out next Thursday, February 2nd. Definitely one to look forward to. They’re just the best. They’re lovely.
Okay, and now it’s time for our headline rundown, starting with yet more tragic news. It has been a hard few weeks.
Courtney Escoyne:
You can say that again. Ballet dancer Ruan Crighton was among the dozens of people who died in a plane crash in Nepal on January 15th. The 34 year old British dancer had trained at Brentwoods’s Central School of Dance before joining the Slovak National Theater and Finnish National Opera and Ballet. He was reportedly enrolled in physiotherapy school in Amsterdam at the time of his death.
Margaret Fuhrer:
And another tragic death to report. Last week, a woman who was found dead in Golden Gate Park was identified as longtime Bay Area dance teacher Beth Louise Abrams. Abrams, who was 73, taught dance for 40 years in the Bay Area. She was discovered in the park beside a fallen tree branch, although an official cause of death has yet to be released.
Courtney Escoyne:
Riverdance creator Michael Flatley shared via Instagram that he had been diagnosed with “an aggressive form of cancer,” and had undergone surgery. A week later, he posted a follow up that he had been released from the hospital and was on the mend, and thanking folks for their support. This is the 64 year old Irish dance star’s second battle with cancer after undergoing treatment from melanoma in 2003. We are wishing him good health and a speedy recovery.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yes, for sure.
Okay, now a bit of much needed hopeful news. Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre has named its new artistic director, following Susan Jaffe’s departure last year. Adam W. McKinney—who is a former dancer with Ailey and LINES and Cedar Lake, to name just a few, and also co-director of the arts and service organization DNAWorks, and until recently an associate professor of dance at Texas Christian University—he will begin as PBT’s new artistic director in March. He is the first director of color in the company’s entire 54 year history, and he shared his vision for PBT’s future with Pointe magazine. We have that story linked for you in the show notes.
Courtney Escoyne:
Some really good news.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yes!
Courtney Escoyne:
And after a successful run at New York City Center, a new production of Parade, starring Ben Platt and McKayla Diamond, will transfer to Broadway. The Hal Prince revival, here directed by Michael Arden, is slated to start previews on February 21st, and open on March 16th for a limited engagement currently set to run through August 6th.
I think we’re going to get a lot more Broadway announcements in the next few weeks as everyone makes the mad dash for Tony eligibility season.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Definitely. Here’s some more exciting Broadway news, actually. I think this is news a lot of theater fans have been awaiting for a while, honestly: Here Lies Love, the acclaimed immersive disco musical about former first lady of the Philippines Imelda Marcos, with music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, will premiere on Broadway this summer. It’ll feature choreography by frequent David Byrne collaborator Annie-B Parsons. The musical made its debut off-Broadway back in 2013 and has had a few different runs since then. This one is going to turn the floor space of the Broadway Theatre on 53rd Street into a dance club.
Courtney Escoyne:
I am so intensely curious about this on so many levels.
And The Shed, an art center in New York City’s Hudson Yards that opened just a year before the pandemic began, has made some changes to its leadership structure in the wake of financial challenges. Founding artistic director Alex Poots will no longer serve as chief executive in the interest of focusing solely on the creative side of the institution. President and chief operating officer Marianne Jordan is handling day-to-day management in the interim. Haven’t necessarily seen anything about a timeline for finalizing what the new structure will be, bringing in anyone new, but very curious to see what develops there as they’ve definitely had some ambitious programming—some hits, some misses, but always swinging for the fences.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. Here’s a similar story, another arts venue rethinking its priorities: The American Dance Institute announced that it will sell its Lumberyard performing arts center in Catskill, NY. The state-of-the-art venue has attracted all kinds of renowned dance artists and companies since opening in 2018. But ADI said demand for the space fell during the pandemic and that it is shifting its focus to other programs.
Courtney Escoyne:
Curious to see what comes of that space. I do believe I also saw that they’re continuing to allow artists to come in and use the space until that sale is finalized, so it’s not quite out yet.
The Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre has paused the presentation of works by Russian artists following the recommendation of the country’s ministry of culture. Works like Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring are being removed from its repertoire until the end of hostilities in Ukraine as “culture in Russia is too closely associated with the aggressive politics of this country.”
Margaret Fuhrer:
New York Live Arts announced that movement artist Miguel Gutierrez is the next recipient of its biennial residency award—he’ll be their next Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist. This award is notable because it includes a fully produced production, and office space, and two years of full-time salary and healthcare benefits. Major. And Gutierrez could not be more deserving. Big congrats to him.
Courtney Escoyne:
Yeah, it’s huge.
And Boston Conservatory has partnered with the Radio City Rockettes to offer a precision dance course beginning this spring. The course will be taught by members of the Rockettes organization and will be open to contemporary and commercial dance majors, musical theater students with a dance emphasis, and dance minors from Berkeley College of Music. But, and I am particularly excited by this note, students of any background or gender identity can take the class. This is really cool.
Margaret Fuhrer:
It is really cool. Here’s something else rather cheerful. The Swedish government has moved to abolish what was essentially a dance ban. A new proposal would end a decade-old requirement in Sweden that restaurants, nightclubs and other venues obtain special licenses to organize dances. Shades of those archaic dance ban laws that you can still occasionally run up against in the United States. Anyway, in a statement, justice minister Gunnar Strömmer said, “It is not reasonable for the state to regulate people’s dance. By removing the requirement for a dance permit, we also reduce bureaucracy and costs for entrepreneurs and others who organize dances.” What good sense all around.
Courtney Escoyne:
And we have a spate of obituaries to report. Pioneering Black tap dancer Arthur Duncan, who became a regular presence on television in the mid 20th century, died on January 4th at age 97.
Lupe Serrano, an American Ballet Theatre star of the 1950s and ’60s who went on to be a celebrated teacher, died on January 16th at age 92 from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Famed Lindy Hop dancer Jean Veloz, best known for her film appearances in 1940s Hollywood musicals, died on January 15th at age 98.
And bharatanatyam dancer and scholar Lakshmi Vishwanathan died on January 19th at age 78.
Margaret Fuhrer:
So, finally, we actually have some pretty big news of our own to share with you all.
Dance Media, our parent company—which publishes Dance Magazine, Dance Spirit, Pointe, and Dance Teacher, along with The Dance Edit—has merged with Hollywood.com. Hollywood.com is an entertainment platform led by Mitch Rubenstein and Lori Silvers, the founders of The SyFy Channel, and Broadway.com, and Movietickets.com, and the e-sports organization Misfits. This is basically a developing news story, things are still in the process of unfolding, but lots of potential synergy here. So stay tuned on that front—exciting things.
That is the end of our headline rundown this episode. But as always, don’t forget to check out the Dance Media Events Calendar, because it has lots more information about all kinds of dance world events, including auditions—which, you know, ’tis the season, and we don’t cover auditions here on the podcast. So to see the full list and to add your own events to it, head to dancemediacalendar.com.
Okay, so now for our discussion segment, we’d like to talk for a few minutes about Star Ballroom Dance Studio, the venue in Monterey Park, California where a gunman opened fire on Saturday night during a Lunar New Year’s Eve party. That shooting left 11 people dead, and information about the shooter and the motive has been trickling out over the past few days. We have some links in the show notes that will tell you more about that.
But today we’d like to focus instead on Star Ballroom itself, a dance studio that since its founding 30 years ago has become a fixture in Monterey Park. A couple of our readers sent a link to a 2016 Pasadena Star-News profile of Star Ballroom that describes how the studio grew into a popular gathering place for, in particular, the older members of this majority Asian American community. As Congresswoman Judy Chu put it in the LA Times, the shooting feels even more devastating because it targeted “an establishment of joy.”
Courtney Escoyne:
Something that I found very interesting as I started to look into this is Monterey Park is, as you noted Margaret, it is a majority Asian American community. I believe the number is roughly 65% Asian American. And also from what I’ve read and come to understand is that it is the kind of community where rather than the focus being on homogenization and assimilating into American culture in a way that ignores or uproots the cultures of the people who have come there as immigrants, it very much celebrates and carries on those traditions.
And while that might not seem like something that would then be directly connected to a ballroom dance studio, I’ve been really intrigued to find out that ballroom dance is actually an extremely popular pastime both in Asia and in the US, and particularly among older Asian American immigrants. And there have been a lot of different articles touching on this idea, but a lot of these studios in Southern California and in this area are actually really concentrated within these very diverse communities.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah, they’re places that are filled with Asian American students and that cater more to social dancers than competition level dancers often. So these are places where older Asian American dancers know they will be welcomed, where they come to find community, to find belonging.
Courtney Escoyne:
And there also seems to be a sense, especially looking at profiles of Star Ballroom in particular from the past several years, of, this was a place that brought in teachers from all over the world, and language barriers were less of an issue, where the idea was, “We’re all coming in together to learn to dance and have fun, get some exercise, socialize.” And if there isn’t a language in common, dance becomes the language that’s in common. Which sounds like a cliché, but clichés exist for a reason, and that is a really beautiful one actually.
Margaret Fuhrer:
That 2016 profile of Star Ballroom that I mentioned, it included this lovely quote from Ming Wei Ma, the instructor and studio manager at Star, who was one of the people killed in the shooting. I just wanted to read that quote, in tribute to him. It addresses some of the things we’ve been talking about.
“I want to provide an active place for the Asian community of Monterey Park to help prolong their life and improve their health. Having a place where people from all over the world can come together and communicate through dance is how I can help.”
There’s also this terrible trend now of gun violence happening at places or events that are meant to be joyful—dance studios, club dance floors, music concerts, places that often feel like safe spaces. And I mean safe in multiple senses, like not just physically safe, but places that allow people to express themselves fully and let go that way. And to have that safety shattered in this violent deadly way is so unspeakably terrible.
Courtney Escoyne:
Yeah, I think we’ve been talking in leading up to recording this podcast about how we wanted to talk about this and address it, and the thing I kept kind of repeatedly saying was, “What do you say? What do you say in the face of this?”
Margaret Fuhrer:
Maybe a good way to end is actually with another writer’s words. Time magazine this week ran an essay by Aimee Phan called “What Dancing Means to Asian American Elders Like My Parents.” So, a very personal perspective on all these ideas.
Courtney Escoyne:
I have a feeling you have the exact quote that I have pulled up in front of me right now.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Probably. There are so many really affecting passages in this essay. But so her mother and father are Vietnamese immigrants who always loved watching dance in variety shows and movie musicals, but only took up ballroom dancing themselves later in life once they knew their children were grown and settled. And Phan says that when she heard the news about the shooting, she thought immediately of her parents and of other senior Asian Americans like them who found, in studios like Star Ballroom, a bit of pleasure for themselves after decades of sacrificing for their families.
So here are some of her words. “I hope that the hateful act of one person will not discourage them from returning, from continuing to seek joy and create happier memories. And I believe it won’t given all they’ve been through in their lives, they are too resilient. They’ve survived loss and suffering before and they will again.”
I do hope you can all take a moment to read Phan’s piece. It’s linked in the show notes, along with some of the other articles that we’ve mentioned.
All right, that’s it for this week. Thanks everyone for joining us. 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.
Courtney Escoyne:
Mind how you go, friends.