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 be talking about the steep drop in Broadway ticket sales during this latest pandemic surge, and what that means for the musical theater industry and its workers. We will discuss the idea of the radically welcoming dance studio, which is a training environment that truly welcomes all students, and also how we can get there. And we will talk about ballerina Sara Mearns’ revelation that she recently took some time away from dance after being diagnosed with depression and burnout, and about how her journey connects to larger conversations that are happening around dance and mental health.
Before all that though, just a quick note: There is a new Dance Edit Extra episode coming out this Saturday on Apple Podcasts. For this eleventh installment in our exclusive interview series, we have the wonderful Ranee and Aparna Ramaswamy of Ragamala Dance Company. They’re a mother-daughter duo—they’ve collaborated for more than three decades—and they’ve dedicated to creating work that shows the Indian classical dance form bharatanatyam as a living art, an art that can tell both ancient and contemporary stories. There are conversations about how to bring traditional dance forms into the present happening in many different parts of the dance world these days, but that idea has always been right at the center of Ranee and Aparna’s work. So I really hope you can tune in for this one. Again, it’ll be out this Saturday the 22nd on Apple Podcasts. We’ve got the direct link in the show notes.
All right, now it’s time for our headline rundown, which is super busy this week.
Lydia Murray:
Cincinnati Ballet has announced that Jodie Gates will become its new artistic director beginning August 1st. Gates, who was the founding director of the USC Gloria Kaufman School of Dance and the founder and artistic director of the Laguna Dance Festival, will take over from Victoria Morgan who is retiring after 25 years leading the company.
Margaret Fuhrer:
A woman-to-woman transition. That is awesome.
Lydia Murray:
Love to see it! More of that please, in the ballet world, in particular.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Seriously, yeah. And we had the Tamara Rojo news last week and now this news. It really does feel like maybe we’ve reached a tipping point, hopefully.
All right. This week in NFT news, because apparently that could be a regular segment on this podcast now: The Wrong Man, the chamber musical that played off-Broadway in 2019, has become the world’s first NFT musical. The digital collectibles available for purchase sometime early this year will be a mix of music, graphics, and film, and include a previously unreleased track from songwriter Ross Golan. So, that’s an interesting new potential revenue stream for musical performers. And there’s also a new live production of The Wrong Man in the works for 2023, so it’s actually not a bad marketing decision either. But I mean, yeah, will this be a new trend in musical theater? I’m actually sort of surprised that it’s a smaller, off-Broadway production that’s doing it first.
Lydia Murray:
Yeah. I’m thinking, on the one hand, it sort of makes sense, because maybe they have a little bit more room to be experimental. I don’t know. But it’ll be interesting to see where dance and theater and NFTs go in the future, especially with the metaverse and web3. A lot to keep our eyes on.
Margaret Fuhrer:
For sure.
Lydia Murray:
An Egyptian school teacher was fired from her job and divorced by her husband after a video of her dancing with colleagues went viral online. But she was reinstated last week after a public outcry.
Margaret Fuhrer:
We’ve included a link to Al Jareeza‘s coverage of that story in the show notes so you can read further.
Following the tragic death of its founder and director Nai-Ni Chen last month, the Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company has announced the appointment of three new artistic leaders, all of them women. The interim artistic director is Greta Campo, formerly the company’s associate artistic director. Former Graham Company principal PeiJu Chien-Pott, who like Chen is an immigrant from Taiwan, will be the company’s choreographer/director of contemporary and creative dance. And company veteran and educator Ying Shi will be its choreographer/director of traditional dance and preservation.
Lydia Murray:
The Debbie Allen Dance Academy has named Tehvon Fowler Chapman as its new executive director. Chapman has an extensive background in executive leadership and arts administration and is currently the executive director of Washington Concert Opera.
Margaret Fuhrer:
The 50th Dance on Camera Festival, which will be held at Lincoln Center from February 11th to 14th, has announced its complete lineup. It includes a mix of short and feature-length films that highlight a variety of global perspectives. Many of them reflect the impact that the pandemic and social justice campaigns have had on the arts world. And then the festival will close with a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Bob Fosse’s film version of Cabaret. We’ve got a link in the show notes with the complete list that you can check out.
Lydia Murray:
More changes from the ballet world: The Pacific Northwest Ballet star Noelani Pantastico is retiring after a beautiful 25-year career. She will join the faculty at her alma mater at Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. Oh man, the end of an era. But she is staying on as co-artistic director of Seattle Dance Collective, which is interesting. Be curious to see how that works, and how we’ll see her artistic imprint continue to play out there.
A Texas-based arts coalition is purchasing a building in Forth Worth that formerly housed a Ku Klux Klan meeting hall, with plans to turn the space into a community art center. The new Fred Rouse Center for the Arts and Community Healing will be named in honor of the Black Fort Worth resident who was lynched by a white mob 100 years ago. And the venue will include space for art exhibitions, services for LGBTQ youth, meeting areas for workshops and community events, and an outdoor market promoting urban farming and local artists. That is a beautiful, poignant evolution.
Lydia Murray:
And the BBC drama “Peaky Blinders” is becoming a ballet. Peaky Blinders: the Redemption of Thomas Shelby will open this Fall at Birmingham Hippodrome and will tour next year. The production is a collaboration with Rambert’s company and will include a cast of 20 and a live band that will play specially commissioned music. Rambert artistic director Benoit Swan Pouffer will stage the ballet.
Margaret Fuhrer:
That sounds almost like a fever dream, but it also sounds like there’s some real interesting potential there. Very curious to see how that turns out.
Here is some more dance news that maybe you didn’t realize you needed. Netflix just premiered Riverdance: The Animated Adventure, which is a movie following an Irish boy and a Spanish girl as they journey into the mythical world of the now-extinct giant Irish Elk. The elk teach them how to appreciate Riverdance as a celebration of life. And yes, that teaching very much does involve animated sequences of giant elk doing real Irish dance steps from the real stage production of Riverdance, which…it sounds bananas saying it out this way, but seeing that animated sequence in the trailer, or bits of it—it was kind of hitting me.
Lydia Murray:
Yeah. Same here. It looks really well-done, and the dancing, even though it’s animated, is so striking.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. Real chills!
Lydia Murray:
The dance world has lost Terry Teachout and Birju Maharaj. Teachout was a prolific arts biographer and essayist who wrote the book All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine. And he covered drama for the Wall Street Journal. He was 65. Maharaj was a legendary kathak dancer credited with being one of the rare artists who was equally excellent at performing and teaching. He passed away at age 83.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Two towering figures in their respective fields. And I know he’s not a dance person, but then to hear the news about André Leon Talley this week too—it has been a tough few days.
Lydia Murray:
I know.
Margaret Fuhrer:
All right. So in our first discussion segment today, we want to talk, once again, about Broadway. I know it feels like we’ve been very heavy on the Broadway coverage these days, but that’s partly because the sheer scale of Broadway means it’s often the bellwether for the rest of the performing arts world. The New York Times had a story this week with a very grabby headline: “Now Is The Winter of Broadway’s Discontent.” And the gist of it was that although most shows are open again following widespread Omicron-related cancellations—and also thanks to the heroic efforts of a lot of swings and understudies, as we talked about a couple episodes ago—audiences have not been returning. Attendance has fallen dramatically during this latest COVID surge. And since most shows need to sell just about every ticket to just about every show to keep operating, that’s a big problem. It’s actually one of the things that Broadway producers were worried about before all the reopenings in the fall, that shows would return and then have to close again quickly because people aren’t ready to come back. So, let’s talk about what the Broadway ticket numbers actually look like and what this all might mean.
Lydia Murray:
You know, the fact that this piece ended on a note of, hey, the upside is that there are bargains and people who normally couldn’t see a Broadway show now can! That was so bittersweet.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Oof, yeah.
Lydia Murray:
But to get into those numbers: There were only 62% of seats occupied during the week that ended January 9th, and that was the lowest attendance had been since a week when musicians went on strike in 2003. And during the weeks of Christmas and New Year’s, box office grosses were only $40 million, compared to $99 million pre-pandemic. Requests for ticket refunds have also spiked significantly. They’ve gotten so high that shows are actually giving back more money than they’re bringing in on certain days.
It seems like audiences are likely feeling apprehensive about making plans to see a show after December’s wave of cancellations, especially since those often happen very close to showtime. Some might also be afraid of getting the virus at a show despite safety protocols. It’s also possible that a lot of audience members themselves now have COVID and can’t attend.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. I mean, a little bit of context: January is typically a softer month for Broadway ticket sales. But these numbers are bad even within that context.
Lydia Murray:
Right. And several shows have been forced to close early because of pandemic-related financial hardship. And Girl From The North Country and Mockingbird have gone on pause for a few months to avoid closing.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah, like Mrs. Doubtfire.
Lydia Murray:
Yeah, exactly. And it really creates an extremely challenging situation for the performers and the crew who are not part of the cast. Some are uncertain whether they’ve worked enough weeks to get unemployment. The Broadway League is trying to get unions to agree to pay cuts to help shows survive. One request was for half-pay for COVID cancellations along with lower pay for reduced performance schedules. But unions are demanding more financial transparency before accepting these pay reductions. The Broadway shows received tens of millions of dollars in federal aid due to the pandemic, but they’re not even disclosing weekly box office grosses for individual shows, which was standard practice in the past.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. I know, that quote from Kate Shindle in the article, the president of Actor’s Equity, saying, “If you want workers to make financial concessions, you’ve got to offer them financial transparency”—that’s really it.
Lydia Murray:
Yeah.
Margaret Fuhrer:
And then also, shutting down shows is also a difficult scenario for these workers, of course. Particularly because they’ll get less unemployment assistance now than they did earlier in the pandemic. The government is no longer offering supplemental assistance.
Lydia Murray:
There need to be long-term solutions, because it seems like we can pretty much all agree COVID is not really going anywhere. We’ll likely have more variants in the future. Maybe we can incorporate digital, streaming, maybe some of the things that were previously seen as stop gaps can now be implemented more permanently in a way that works for as many people as possible.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah, yeah, maybe. And there are, as the piece pointed out, some signs of hope here. One of them—this is grim, but so many performers have already tested positive, and most are now back at work. We’re basically approaching herd immunity in this particular population of theater workers. Thankfully, no performers were hospitalized during the Omicron wave so far. And productions are now finally sinking some real money into hiring replacement performers and crew members. Fingers crossed that that then becomes the norm going forth. So, now that Omicron has hopefully peaked in New York City, yeah, the hope is that audiences start to feel safer coming back to the theater for multiple reasons. And that’s of course true not just for Broadway, but for all of the performing arts.
Lydia Murray:
Yeah.
Margaret Fuhrer:
We have linked to the New York Times story in the show notes so that you can read the whole thing.
So next up today, we’re moving from the theater to the studio. Dance Teacher published an excellent piece this week about the “radically welcoming” dance studio. As we’ve talked about at much length on this podcast, dance training environments are not always the healthiest spaces. They often either implicitly or explicitly exclude certain dancers as well. So this story asked, what does it mean for a dance studio to be truly welcoming to all students? And is simply being welcoming enough? Or is it just the beginning of a larger evolution that needs to happen in our approach to dance education?
Lydia Murray:
So generally, the idea of radical welcoming is to create a sense of belonging, I would say. In the context of dance, I think it’s about everyone being able to bring their full and true selves to the studio regardless of precedent or established norms or the comfort level of those who fit those norms. The radical part isn’t necessarily so much in the act of welcoming all students, it’s in the willingness to adapt. And that’s what the subjects of this piece discussed.
Last year, Dr. Christopher Emdin lead a year-long investigation into the idea of radical welcoming for Lincoln Center Activate. And he said that teachers need to bend themselves to the needs of the students, which I thought was a really great way of putting that. He also mentioned fear. Something interesting that he pointed out was that the fear can exist both among teachers who are used to the status quo and also with young students who have been conditioned to be unwelcomed. And moving through both of those forms, a fear can lead to new possibilities.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah, I really appreciated Dr. Emdin’s focus on flexibility, the idea that just because something has always been done a certain way doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it. Like, tradition-bound teaching—nobody’s denying the value of tradition, but we have to have enough awareness to recognize the traditions that are unhelpful or even harmful. And that can take, as he says, some courage. Not everybody will react positively to that kind of change, including students themselves, because they’ve been conditioned to expect them.
Lydia Murray:
Exactly. It can be challenging on all sides. And Krishna Washburn I thought gave a great example of what this can look like in practice. She’s the artistic director of Dark Room Ballet, which is a specialized dance curriculum for blind and visually impaired dancers. She pointed out that if you’re not doing audio description, you can’t be radically welcoming to blind, visually impaired, and disabled people. When she teaches, she describes every movement completely. She never stops speaking. She does it rhythmically with the music in order to maintain the patterning. And she’s also writing a dance dictionary, and her students get a vocabulary email before each class so they have movement concepts that they can apply when she’s speaking. And she went on to say that existing dance dictionaries aren’t really meant for students. I thought this quote really said it, where she said, “How do you explain a tendu to somebody who doesn’t even know what a pointed foot is?” She also said to remove the stigma of having no prior knowledge and needing to listen and practice continually as opposed to understanding in a split second. And she said that that’s not how people develop deep learning, regardless of whether they have a disability.
I think something that may create challenges for the radical welcoming model of dance education is the friction that exists for a lot of teachers between helping their student learn dance itself and preparing them for the dance world. And much of the dance world is so many of the “-ists,” so to speak. Ableist, sexist, you name it. I mean, there is often an emphasis on learning quickly in class because that’s what’s valued in the professional world, which is a problem in itself. Even though I understand the reasons, in terms of the idea that time is money and so forth, it’s still ableist, and it still could be better. But yeah, radical welcoming seems to be just part of a larger shift in this way of thinking.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah, yeah. There needs to be some top-down change too for sure within professional organizations.
I liked Dr. Nyama McCarthy-Brown pointing out that because so many students have been conditioned to expect hyper-competitive, exclusionary dance spaces, you can actually sort of counter-program that with some very simple steps. She suggested using specific directives, like, tell your students to go greet three new people at the beginning of class. Or tell them to find someone in the studio they have something in common with. Like it can be … The first steps to creating a welcoming space can be that simple. That’s not going to solve the whole problem, but I think sometimes the idea of changing the entire dance space this way seems so overwhelming that thinking about a simple step like that can be helpful.
Lydia Murray:
Yeah, that idea of welcoming your neighbor into the space and, yeah, like you were saying, that competitive element doesn’t really have to be part of the dance studio experience.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. And I also, coming back again to this idea of flexibility in teaching, Hope Boykin emphasized the idea of meeting your students where they are, as Dr. Emdin suggested. But she put the emphasis on the planning that you as a teacher are doing for your dance class. It’s not just about correcting your students, it’s about course correcting your own plan as you go along so you’re best serving those students’ needs. I liked her quote about, once you’re in the studio with your students, sticking to your plan is for the birds. You got to go with the dancers who are in front of you and what they need.
Lydia Murray:
Yeah. You have to be able to change, have to be able to pivot.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. I mean obviously, we just did a whole bunch of paraphrasing. I hope you have a chance to read these artists’ own words in the Dance Teacher story. We have linked that in the show notes for easy reference.
Finally today, we wanted to talk about a very raw, very candid post that ballerina Sara Mearns shared on Instagram last week. She’d been quiet for a few months on the app, and then this post revealed that last October, she was diagnosed with depression and burnout. And after talking to a sports psychologist, she decided to take some time away from dance to focus on her mental health, because not doing so would have been, as she said, “dangerous for me as an athlete and as a person.”
First of all, Sara, we wish you all the best on your continued recovery. Sharing that kind of deeply personal information takes a lot of courage, as does choosing to take a step back when the world sees you as being at the top of your game. So, bravo for taking those steps.
And it does seem like we’re seeing more dancers doing this kind of sharing and starting these kinds of public conversations. Which, of course, emphasizes just how urgently dance needs to prioritize mental health, that there are so many people out here dealing with these kinds of problems. But it also signals a shift in our willingness to acknowledge the issue, which feels hopeful.
Lydia Murray:
It does feel hopeful. Sending so much support her way. It does take a lot of courage to come forward about this, and I think the tide is changing in dance and more people are recognizing the importance of mental health. Dancers often pride ourselves on our ability to withstand pretty much anything and to push past our limits regardless of the long-term consequences. And this isn’t just part of our training for many of us, but also just part of the driven type-A personalities that we tend to have. And it can be powerful when people at the absolute top of the field, like Sara Mearns and other highly respected dancers, speak up about mental health and what they’re doing to care for theirs. And I think when other dancers see that, I’m sure they can feel less alone.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. I mean there are so many shades of Simone Biles here. I just feel like we need to keep saying thank you to her over and over again for helping to set a new standard in how we talk about performers’ mental health. Like, one of the common themes that struck me was the idea of a performer’s mental state putting them in physical danger. Sara mentioned that specifically. And on the one hand, it’s a little frustrating that we have to get to the point where someone could actually hurt themselves to justify them taking time away from their craft. But it also shows exactly what the stakes are. They are extremely high.
Lydia Murray:
So high. And letting mental health go unaddressed in a dance company, I think, can hurt the whole organization, since it can lead to physical issues, missed performances, poor interpersonal relationships, and so forth.
And of course, not everyone will feel comfortable publicly sharing their struggle, and that’s okay, too. Sometimes I wonder, even though vulnerability is beneficial for leaders, I don’t know how much it actually helps those who aren’t seen as unequivocally successful. I still have a concern that going public with mental health issues—will it still backfire if you’re not considered to have proven yourself already? What happens to a less high-profile dancer who’s struggling with mental health? It’s important for them to also receive support, through both healthcare resources and moral support.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah, that’s a really important point. This is really complicated, obviously. You know what was interesting to me was that just before Sara stepped away from dance, during the New York City Ballet’s fall season, people couldn’t stop talking about how great she looked, she’d never danced better. There was the sense that some performers maybe were a little technically shaky after having to take multiple months off, essentially, because of the pandemic. But she looked like she’d never stopped dancing. She was right at the top of her form. Which goes to show that what’s happening onstage does not at all reflect a performer’s mental well-being.
Lydia Murray:
Yeah. It’s so easy to just focus on what we can see. But we have to care about people as people. Dancers are still human beings.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yes. Dancers are in fact people. Your weekly friendly reminder that dancers are people!
Lydia Murray:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Margaret Fuhrer:
So Sara will be back on stage with City Ballet for its winter season, which starts next week. Merde, Sara, we’re rooting for you. And we’ve linked to her Instagram post in the show notes.
All right, that’s it for us this week. Thanks everyone for joining. We will 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.