I am branding myself. No, I am not applying a hot iron to my buttocks as cowboys do with steers. But I am doing something that, at least among some of my colleagues, is equally as controversial. I am attempting to make myself into a ballet product.

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On Jan. 25, 2012, the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation announced that its executive director, Sharon Gersten Luckman, would be stepping down in 2013 after 16 years as executive director and 20 years with the Ailey organization. Dance/USA's From the Green Room asked Luckman to reflect on her accomplishments as well as challenges facing the Ailey company and the dance world.

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Dancing is an art that takes a lifetime to perfect – and just a moment to lose. In fact, more than 80 percent of dancers experience injury during their careers, with some grave enough to end an individual’s role as a dancer forever.
It is these numbers that make those behind the stage question what steps need to be taken to improve the dance floor – the integral component of a dance environment – to protect the welfare of performers and ensure they have long, healthy careers ahead.

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Few choreographers have the power to effect life-altering changes the way Pina Bausch did over the course of her 50-year career, and, even now, three years after her untimely death. That is what Pina does. She changes your life. She changed mine.

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What constitutes the life span for a dance company? Is it better to see a company close rather than become a shadow of what it once was? Responding to a recent Facebook inquiry, Houston-based dance writer Nancy Wozny stated, “The life span of a dance company should be as individual as the artists themselves. Not every arts organization needs to be around forever. Some pop up as a result of a particular time in an artist’s life, and the world they operate in. Times shift and things do go away. I feel we need to be more welcoming of things that end.”

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Artistry doesn’t come out of thin air; it evolves by being nurtured, sweated over, re-worked, perhaps a little bloodied, and revived. Believe it or not, sometimes art needs to fail. Jennifer S.B Calienes, director of Tallahassee’s Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, one of our nations top-tier dance residency programs, says of necessary artistic failures, “Some of the best work dies ... but it is critical that (dance makers) have that time and space to think, develop, edit, and hone.” These efforts are called the artistic process.

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In the dance class of the future every student gets documented feedback on everything she does using the same technology found in today’s video games. The implications for the game-ification of dance are exciting and offer a glimpse of a future that marries artistry, gaming, and digital communication together.

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Funding for the NEA has been a flagship issue for arts organizations for years. Arts advocates must be spending their waking hours working to restore funding to the NEA so that we can continue to support the work of the non-profit arts community by funding the creation, presentation, and education of quality arts programs. This is serious, right?

Would it surprise you to learn that the answer to that is actually, “Yes, but ….”?

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I’ve spent a lot of time worrying and writing about what is ballet and have grown tired of reading crossover choreographers say that their works are “firmly rooted in the classical tradition” when they don’t even give a nod to “the classical tradition.” I haven’t worried about modern dance because I believe at the center of its identity is that it must reinvent itself with every generation. Each generation has a right to do what it wants. So what does it want in 2012?

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Stephen Manes spent a year at Pacific Northwest Ballet researching his new book, Where Snowflakes Dance and Swear: Inside the Land of Ballet. He recently summarized one aspect of his findings in this holiday post.

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