Contact:
Angela Ramacci
aramacci@danceusa.org
(202) 833-1717 x13

The new Trustees Award will be given on an ad hoc basis to individuals or organizations that, in the opinion of the Board of Trustees, have made significant and unique contributions to the dance field. Unlike the existing Honors and “Ernie” (given biennially since 1986), this award will be bestowed whenever the Board of Trustees deems it appropriate to acknowledge individuals or organizations that merit this special recognition. Details about Arthur Mitchell and Sage Cowles, the esteemed recipients of the 2004 Honors and “Ernie,” are included in a separate release.

A tireless champion for the field, Alan M. (“Mike”) Kriegsman, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1976, remains the sole recipient of that honor in the realm of Dance Criticism. Mike has worked tirelessly to help build a national voice for dance — a voice that speaks to artists and audiences, as well as young writers and administrators. Garth Fagan, Tony Award–winning choreographer and founder/artistic director of Garth Fagan Dance, describes this writing style as “suitable for the most sophisticated dance cognoscenti [and] someone encountering dance for the first time.”

When Mike joined the staff of the Washington Post as a music and cultural critic in the 1960s, there was no full-time staff dance critic at the newspaper. As Doug Sonntag, Director for Dance at the National Endowment for the Arts said, “[Kriegsman] insisted on and fought for the rightful place of dance in the pages of the newspaper, and more broadly, for its central position in American culture. His written record is itself an invaluable document of dance history.” And it was Kriegsman’s own passionate devotion and care for dance, as signaled by the 1976 Pulitzer Prize he won for his dance writing, that convinced the Post editors to allow him to write full-time about the field. His tenure at the Post is seen as a Golden Age of dance writing. Mike served as performing arts critic (music, dance, theater, film, television) for the Washington Post from 1966 until 1996, when he retired and was named Critic Emeritus. In addition to reviews, features, reportage and essays, he created a Sunday column called “Crosscurrents” which ran for more than a decade. In 1974, the Post appointed him to be the first full-time dance critic in the paper’s history. Two years later, in 1976, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, the first and only time the award in the criticism category was given for writings about the art of dance. At the Post, he encouraged other critical voices, inviting more than a half dozen dance writers to work with him to write about the burgeoning dance activities in the nation’s capital. His journalistic career began at the San Diego Union, 1960–1965, where he served as the music, drama and dance critic. In 1965, he was named Assistant to the President of the Juilliard School in New York, where he edited the school publications, taught a criticism course, adjudicated scholarship and performance auditions and helped prepare for the school’s move to Lincoln Center. He has served three terms as a member of the Board of Directors of the Dance Critics Association (DCA); numerous times as visiting faculty for the Critics Conference at the American Dance Festival, and as a member of MIT’s Visiting Committees on the Arts and Humanities. He was a member of the Leadership Group for the National Dance/Media Project at UCLA, and of the juries for the annual Pola Nirenska Award administered by the Washington Performing Arts Society. He currently serves on the Boards of Directors of the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation, the Choo-San Goh and H. Robert Magee Foundation, and the Dance Institute of Washington. He has been, on four occasions, a member of the Pulitzer Prize jury in the music, criticism and feature writing categories. Among honors accorded him are a Metropolitan Area Mass Media (AAUW) award in 1988 for his Washington Post appreciation of Fred Astaire; a Washington Review of the Arts award in 1979 for “outstanding writing on the new arts”; a 1995 “Dance in the District” Award for “outstanding contributions” to the dance field in the Washington, DC area; a 2002 Metro DC Dance Award for his “inestimable contribution to the Washington area dance community over three decades”; and a 2003 “Outstanding Service Award” from the International Association of Blacks in Dance. In 1995, he was one of eight American participants in an international symposium, convened in St. Petersburg, on Russian influences on 20th century choreography, where he presented a paper on the career and dance works of Bronislava Nijinska. In 1989 at Miami-Dade Community College, he lectured on “Balanchine and Music” at the Miami Balanchine Conference, which brought together Russian and American dance critics and scholars and former Balanchine principal dancers. At the national Dance Critics Association conference in Los Angeles in 1990, he co-designed and co-directed (with Gus Solomons, Jr.) the organization’s first Multicultural Scholarship Program in Dance Criticism.

Born February 28, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, Kriegsman was educated at New York City public schools, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Columbia University (B.S., magna cum laude, 1951; M.A. in musicology, 1953; and completion of doctoral requirements). He is a veteran of the US Army (1946–1947). He was a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in musicology at the University of Vienna in 1956–1957. He has taught artistic subjects at Columbia, Barnard, Hunter College, Juilliard, the University of California, the University of Minnesota, Harvard, Temple, George Washington University, American University and the University of Maryland. He is the author of a 1975 monograph on ballerina Suzanne Farrell in the Dance Horizon’s “Spotlight” series. His radio and television appearances have included a PBS McNeil-Lehrer special in 1983 in tribute to George Balanchine. His writings on the performing arts have appeared in the Reporter, Saturday Review, Cultural Affairs, Horizon, the Musical Quarterly, and elsewhere. Archives of his writings and research are compiled in the Alan M. and Sali Ann Kriegsman Collection at the Library of Congress. His biography is included in Who’s Who in America.

The physical award Mike will receive is a work of art by sculptor Rita Blitt. The dancing lines of her sculpture and painting are a fitting tribute to his contributions to the dance field. Mr. Kriegsman will attend Dance/USA’s Roundtable 2004 and receive his recognition in person.

The 11th Biennial Dance/USA National Roundtable 2004 occurs June 10–11 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is a unique event this year in a number of ways. The Roundtable is being held in conjunction with the first National Performing Arts Convention (June 9–12), which includes the simultaneous national conferences of Dance/USA, American Symphony Orchestra League, OPERA America, and Chorus America, as well as special meetings of numerous other major performing arts service organizations. The Convention, as well as several Dance/USA Roundtable activities, takes place at the architecturally exciting new David L. Lawrence Convention Center.

Dance/USA was founded in 1982 to advance the art form of dance through a variety of programs including publications, advocacy, research, professional development, public communications and re-granting initiatives. This year’s Roundtable marks the 22nd Anniversary of Dance/USA. For more information on Dance/USA or Roundtable 2004, contact Dance/USA: 1156 15th Street, NW, Suite 820, Washington, DC 20005; tel: (202) 833-1717; fax: (202) 833-2686; e-mail: danceusa@danceusa.org. For press passes to attend events at Roundtable 2004, contact Angela Ramacci, (202) 833-1717 x13, or aramacci@danceusa.org. To register as a member or non-member for Roundtable 2004, click here (PDF, 288k).

Dance/USA 2004 National Roundtable Champions