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November 11, 2009

Grants Made to Benefit Young Dancers
November 2, 2009
The New York Times

American Ballet Theater has received a $500,000 matching grant from the Arison Arts Foundation, the ballet company has announced. The grant will help cover a fellowship for one dancer each year as part of a new partnership between ABT II and YoungArts, a national organization that supports 17- and 18-year-olds in the visual, literary and performing arts.

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Playing in Peoria
by Peter Marks
November 9, 2009
The Washington Post

Rocco Landesman is hitting the art scene hard in this modest city on the Illinois River, and he's liking it. Well, no, that's not quite correct: He's loving it! The new waterfront cultural area? "Beautiful!" Peoria artist Lonnie Stewart's model of a sculptural slave memorial? "Powerful!" And how about those plucky kids in the production of "Rent" over at Eastlight Theatre?

"I'm having a good time!" Landesman reports at intermission in the hallway of East Peoria High School to Eastlight's executive director, Kathy Chitwood. She's the local live wire who, outraged by a now-notorious Landesman crack about the city, dragooned the newly installed chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts here on Friday for an immersion in culture, Peoria-style.

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He Produces Controversy
by Lee Rosenbaum
November 3, 2009
The Wall Street Journal

Veteran Broadway theater producer Rocco Landesman, off to a rocky start in his new gig as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), demonstrated at a meeting of arts funders in Brooklyn two weeks ago that he had no plans to change his act. In the first major speech since assuming his post in mid-August (a keynote address at the annual conference of Grantmakers in the Arts), the chairman acknowledged the "reconstructive" work of his predecessors, Dana Gioia and Bill Ivey, in rebuilding the agency's "credibility—good grant by good grant."

He then said: "It's time now to move the ball down the field."

In a freewheeling conversation we had on the day of his Brooklyn visit, Mr. Landesman was true to form—brashly candid. But his provocative words in both the speech and our discussion suggest that he doesn't see what's looming between him and the goal—political opponents, waiting to tackle him.

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Yo-Yo Ma, Sarah Jessica Parker join arts panel
by Ed O'Keefe
November 2, 2009
The Washington Post

Several stars of stage, screen and fashion runways will join the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, a largely ceremonial, blue-ribbon group that advises President Obama on arts and cultural issues.

Yo-Yo Ma, who played at Obama's inauguration, will join the panel, along with actor Edward Norton, "Sex and the City" star Sarah Jessica Parker, actress and Democratic Party activist Kerry Washington, "Last King of Scotland" and "Good Morning Vietnam" star Forest Whitaker, Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour and movie and TV regular Alfre Woodard.

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Isadora Duncan Awards
by Mary Ellen Hunt
November 3, 2009
The San Francisco Chronicle

Dohee Lee and Jo Kreiter will be honored for outstanding achievement by the 24th annual Isadora Duncan Awards, which recognize contributions to Bay Area dance between Sept. 1, 2008, and Aug. 31, 2009.

Lee will be honored for "Flux," an interdisciplinary piece commissioned by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Kreiter for "The Ballad of Polly Ann," a tribute to the women who built the Bay Area's bridges.

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Merce Cunningham Memorial 'Events' in New York
by Mark Swed
October 29, 2009
The Los Angeles Times

Wednesday afternoon and evening, dozens of dancers young and old, leading lights of American avant garde music and a large milling public invaded New York's Park Avenue Armory to remember Merce Cunningham. The startling 1881 structure, built to house the Seventh Regiment in Tiffany splendor (those were the days), is now a massive and inventive art and performance space.

But even it could barely contain "Events in Honor of Merce -- Memorial," a five-hour tribute to the work and life of the legendary dancer and choreographer, who died at 90 in August. Throughout his seven-decade career, Cunningham treated all containers, including the human body, as challenges. And the memorial was the result of a lifetime of stretching and expanded boundaries, of rethinking everything in and about dance from the ground up -- way up.

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George Zoritch, Star in Ballet Russe Companies, Is Dead at 92
by Anna Kisselgoff
November 5, 2009
The New York Times

George Zoritch, an international star in the rival Ballet Russe companies who stood out for his matinee-idol looks and bold stage presence and who later became one of American ballet’s respected teachers, died on Sunday in Tucson, where he lived. He was 92.

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In Remembrance of Dr. Marion Coles
November 8, 2009
maddrhythms.com

Tap lost another legend on Friday, November 6th, 2009. Dr. Marion Coles, leader and choreographer of “The Silver Belles” and wife of the late great Honi Coles, passed away.

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Information on services for Dr. Cole is available at www.traditionintap.org/index3.html#DrMarionColes

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Can Modern Dance be Preserved?
by Arthur Lubow
November 5, 2009
The New York Times Magazine

On July 27, the day after the choreographer Merce Cunningham died, there was an open house at the West Village studio in which his dance company has operated since 1971. A little before 6 p.m., some 40 current and former dancers, in warm-up clothes or street garb, drifted onto the wooden floor. As a pianist picked out strains of Bach, Robert Swinston, a longtime Cunningham dancer who was also the choreographer’s assistant, held an abbreviated class in Cunningham technique. In recent years, with the master crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, Swinston or another veteran often led students and company dancers through the steps. But Cunningham would still come to the studio every day; now the company was heading forth with lonely solemnity, like a riderless horse that misses the familiar hand on the reins. In this work space where Cunningham created and rehearsed his dances­, the uncanny sense that he continued to watch lingered. At the end of the session, as Swinston pressed his hands together in the Namaste gesture of thanks, the dancers hugged one another, their cheeks streaked with tears.

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Vanishing pointe: where are all the great female choreographers?
by Judith Mackrell
October 27, 2009
guardian.co.uk

Dance has always been seen as the one art form where women weren't just more visible than men, but were also in charge. From the pioneering contemporary choreographer Martha Graham, to the Royal Ballet founder Ninette de Valois, to the late, great Pina Bausch, the list of female names who have been pivotal to the profession is as impressive as it is long. Yet last week, Britain's leading dance festival, Dance Umbrella, joined forces with the pressure group Dance UK to host a sell-out debate that was titled, starkly, Where Are All the Women?

It's an issue that has been sparking all summer. While the dance scene has never appeared healthier, it is also one that looks distinctly alpha male. In the UK, choreographers such as Wayne McGregor, Matthew Bourne, Michael Clark and Russell Maliphant dominate our stages and our press. Even though plenty of women are out there – making very personal, very challenging work – few are producing the large-scale box-office hits delivered by their male peers.

So what has changed? Has dance simply caved into the wider, sexist culture, or are there specific issues ­ affecting the profession right now? And is this apparent marginalisation something women have chosen – or has it been foisted on them?

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Foundation Giving Faces Steeper Decline Than Expected
by Ian Wilhelm
November 4, 2009
The Chronicle of Philanthropy

A new report suggests that grant makers will cut back their giving this year more than previously expected.

In January the Foundation Center estimated that foundations would reduce their grant making 8 to 13 percent, but a new survey from the New York research group indicates that “the decline will be on the steeper end of that range.”

While the stock market has trended upward in recent months, foundation investment gains will not make up for the financial loss in 2008, when philanthropic assets fell an estimated 22 percent, says the center.

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What's Wrong with Charitable Giving - and How to Fix It
by Pablo Eisenberg
November 9, 2009
The Wall Street Journal

It's hard to overstate the crisis facing charitable giving today. So let me just say it as plainly as I can: Much of current philanthropic giving, by foundations and individuals, neither meets the needs of our charitable organizations nor addresses some of our most urgent public needs.

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