• COCA Names Kelly Lamb Pollock as Executive Director
  
• New York City Ballet: Dancing Through Recession
• Virtual NPAC - An Online Gathering of the Performing Arts Community
• Marina Semyonova, Star of Bolshoi Ballet, Dies at 102 
• Does Size Matter in the Arts?
• TV Gives Dance a Boost, and That’s Good, Right?
• Donations to Culture Decline 2.4% in Year After Lehman Collapse
  

COCA Names Kelly Lamb Pollock as Executive Director
June 11, 2010

COCA (Center of Creative Arts) has announced that Kelly Lamb Pollock will be the arts organization’s new executive director. Pollock, who currently serves as COCA’s general manager, was selected after an extensive national search. Pollock will assume her new role on July 1, 2010.

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New York City Ballet: Dancing Through Recession
by Patricia O'Connell
June 15, 2010
Business Week

Pressure to cut costs, find new revenue sources, rethink what doesn't make money, and increase repeat business are confronting all businesses during this tentative economic recovery. For Kathy Brown, executive director of the New York City Ballet, the issues are particularly acute. "Ballet tickets become an unjustifiable luxury to people without jobs, and donations dry up as traditional philanthropic sources also fall victim to a challenging economy," observes Brown, who assumed the newly minted position in December 2009.

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Virtual NPAC - An Online Gathering of the Performing Arts Community

The National Performing Arts Convention (NPAC), the consortium of national performing arts service organizations, announces Virtual NPAC, a unique, lively, interactive web-based gathering for the performing arts community. Virtual NPAC can be found through the new National Performing Arts Convention web resource at http://performingartsconvention.org.

Virtual NPAC (VNPAC) brings together highlights from the annual conferences and constituencies of NPAC partner organizations to share and learn from each other like never before. Virtual NPAC features live-streamed sessions, recorded presentations, discussion, tweets, blogs, vlogs and more from the American Music Center, Chorus America, Dance/USA, the League of American Orchestras, OPERA America, and Theatre Communications Group. Everyone in the performing arts community is invited to take part, read, watch, post, share and be heard at this unique online convening.

Several blog posts and tweets from Dance/USA's Annual Conference are archived on the site, so be sure to check it out!

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Marina Semyonova, Star of Bolshoi Ballet, Dies at 102
by Bruce Weber
June 9, 2010
The New York Times

Marina Semyonova, the first great Russian ballerina to emerge in the Soviet era, who for two decades was the prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Theater and became a revered teacher after her retirement in the early 1950s, died on Wednesday in Moscow. She was 102.

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Does Size Matter in the Arts?
by Michael Kaiser
June 14, 2010
Huffington Post

One of the frustrating responses I receive to my "Arts in Crisis" presentations is that my recipe for success only works for large organizations in big cities.

I could not disagree more. I believe that planning far in advance is more important for smaller organizations than larger ones. Smaller organizations have a harder time developing the large transformational projects than larger organizations. That is why they tend to remain small. If they take the time to plan large, exciting programs four or five years in advance, they would be far more likely to find the resources they require to mount these programs. This would allow them to build visibility in the community, attract stronger board members, and increase their ability to generate resources. Planning should not be left to the larger groups.

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TV Gives Dance a Boost, and That’s Good, Right?
by Claudia La Rocco
June 7, 2010
The New York Times

In the 1990s the British producer Nigel Lythgoe confronted an unanticipated and unsettling side effect to the popularity of his television series “Gladiators”: children were emulating the show’s cast members, slamming into one another on playgrounds without helmets and hurting themselves.

“I learned then that you do carry a large amount of weight on your shoulders when you produce a television show,” Mr. Lythgoe said during a recent phone interview. “With that comes a responsibility.”

These days he is experiencing another sort of influence, one that he finds far more enjoyable. His hit American show, “So You Think You Can Dance,” now in its seventh season on Fox, is one of several unabashedly populist competition series, including “Dancing With the Stars” and “America’s Best Dance Crew,” affecting practice in studios, rehearsal halls and stages across America. “So You Think” winners have almost all been young generalists, able to move through a gauntlet of athletic, emotive styles and short, crowd-pleasing choreographic routines.

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Donations to Culture Decline 2.4% in Year After Lehman Collapse
by Patrick Cole
June 9, 2010
Bloomberg.com

Giving to arts and culture in the U.S. in 2009, the second full year after the recession began, fell 2.4 percent from 2008 to $12.3 billion, according to a report published by the Giving USA Foundation.

That decline was less than the 6.4 percent drop to $12.8 billion in 2008, the Glenview, Illinois-based organization shows.

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