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Friday, February 1, 2002 Washington, DC
I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge Dr. Michael Hammond, who
began his service at the National Endowment for the Arts on January
22. With Dr. Hammond's passing on Monday evening January 28, the
arts community lost a great friend. I'm especially saddened by Dr.
Hammond's death because we will not benefit from his passion for
the arts and his knowledge of dance. During his tenure at SUNY College
at Purchase, Dr. Hammond served for a time as chairman of the dance
department becoming in the process acquainted with the core needs
and values of our world. He will be missed.
At this point, we have not heard when a new chairman might be named.
Eileen Mason, the senior deputy chairman, has been named acting
chairman, a position she will probably hold for several months.
So, here we are in Washington, a place not particularly known for
its rich dance history. But dig beneath the thick veneer of political
life that so fascinates and repels the rest of the country and you'll
find a real city that has made a substantial contribution to American
dance culture. Today Washington can boast of its fine ballet company,
nationally known modern dancers, visionary presenters, and schools
that produce dancers of the highest caliber. But, like the fairy
tales that underpin so many story ballets, Washington's dance life
began once upon a time.
In 1840, Fanny Elssler, one of the greatest ballerinas of the Romantic
Era, wrote in her diary, "I am about to cross the Atlantic and proceed
to America! I cannot look upon this strange intention as other than
a mad freak that has seized my fancy in a thoughtless moment. …
My sober judgement could never have brought me to such a resolution."
Little did Elssler know the reception that would await her. Her
planned stay of three months extended into two years; she broke
her contract with the Paris Opéra, where she was a prima ballerina,
to stay in America, where her hold on the popular imagination would
make her both rich and famous.
Her performances in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore,
and Richmond created a general mania. Tickets to her performances
were auctioned off (by the theaters' owners!) to the highest bidder;
whiskey bottles and shirt studs bore her likeness; lithographs showing
her costumed for exotic solos sold in the thousands; and her carriage,
unhitched from horses, was drawn through the streets of Baltimore
by impassioned admirers. Richmond greeted the dancer with tolling
bells and cannons. Washington was not immune to the power of celebrity.
According to the The Dance Encyclopedia:
The eighth president of the United States, Martin Van Buren, and
his cabinet received her in an official audience. Congress adjourned
every evening she danced in Washington because most members attended
her performances and no quorum could be made; at a formal banquet
in the Capitol her health was drunk from a dance slipper.
Elssler's success proved to be a false dawn for American ballet
and other forms of concert dance. Her subsequent influence on the
development of dance in the United States was negligible. Concert
dance, which before her arrival fell somewhere between "tightrope
walking and fancy dancing," soon returned to the artistic fringe.
Fanny Elssler returned to Europe where she danced for several more
years to great acclaim, retiring at age 41, still beautiful and
fabulously wealthy. She died in her native Vienna in 1884.
Well, if it happened once upon a time, maybe it can happen twice.
We do need to have some faith in the possibilities of our shared
passion. I must admit, it's difficult to imagine Trent Lott, Tom
Daschle, Dennis Hastert, and Dick Gephardt (I'm trying to be bipartisan
here) drinking champagne from a pink toe shoe. In fact, I'm not
sure they would know what a toe shoe is exactly. And I suppose that
President Bush is too preoccupied at the moment to host dancers
at the White House. But we do have hope.
The president's budget for 2002 contained the first increase for
the Arts Endowment in the past 10 years, $10.0 million earmarked
for Challenge America, a new program that is designed to strengthen
families, communities, and our nation through the arts. Its goals
are to foster arts education initiatives that serve rural areas
and underserved communities, and to engage artists and arts organizations
and American communities in partnerships to make the arts central
to community life.
In addition to Challenge America, by now you should all have received
guidelines for 2003. Guidelines for 2003 are essentially unchanged
from previous years. The categories remain the same: Creativity,
Organizational Capacity, Access, and Heritage and Preservation.
There are two deadlines March 25 and August 12.
Arts Learning guidelines, which are for projects that focus on
young people both in school and out of school will be available
in May. Arts Learning was a pilot category this year. Applications
were reviewed in multi-disciplinary panels. Both the category itself
and the adjudication process are now under review. We expect the
deadline for Arts Learning applications to be in August.
Those of you with pending applications in Arts Learning, Access
and Heritage and Preservation will be notified following the March
8 meeting of the National Council of the Arts.
With some 300 applications coming into the Endowment each year,
we get a good snapshot of what is happening in dance. Seen through
the filter of the applications, I would say the state of American
dance is complicated. There is no single description that fully
encompasses its strengths, weaknesses and general health. It is
surely one of the most diverse disciplines in contemporary culture.
What I do see is an increased awareness and sense of stewardship
for the care of the dance legacy. The fight over the use of Martha
Graham's name and the rights to perform her ballets remains unresolved.
Regardless of the outcome, this long and tragic battle has certainly
been an unambiguous lesson to both companies and choreographers
to fully resolve issues of copyright and the ultimate ownership
of work.
The turn of the millennium also allowed us to focus on the dance
creativity of the past century and to realize, with some horror,
that so much of what we take for granted-the glorious production
of dance art that made the last century "the American century"-is
very nearly lost. It is lost in crumbling videotapes and films,
lost in archives that were never created or poorly maintained. Lost
in our willingness to sacrifice the past in our remorseless pursuit
of the new.
But there are serious and thoughtful attempts to stem the hemorrhage
of our artistic blood. The Dance Heritage Coalition is a unique
institution. Virtually no other artistic discipline has managed
to corral the major national repositories into a collective effort
to ensure its history.
The projects funded by the National Initiative to Preserve America's
Dance have heightened both the need for preservation and the actual
skills and practices of dance archivists.
Now in its third year, Save America's Treasures, a program administered
through the National Park Service, has awarded three grants to dance
preservation projects: $250,000 to the Dance Notation Bureau for
the notation of 10 important dances; $90,000 to the Dance Heritage
Coalition for the preservation of dance collections in Arizona,
Hawaii, and Illinois; and most recently $50,000 to Ohio University
for preservation of films and videotapes of Alwin Nikolais and Murray
Louis.
Other observations from this past year: With a few exceptions,
ballet companies seem to have remained on an upward trajectory.
Budgets have increased, the number of performances has increased
and audiences seem to remain loyal. The level of dancing is very
high. It is also gratifying to see companies maturing into institutions
that reinforce civic pride and community identity in measure equal
to that of symphony orchestras, museums and opera companies.
Touring, so crucial to modern dance companies, is difficult to
assess at the moment being subject to the economy, September 11,
and the new difficulties and cost of travel. Happily, the dire predictions
of wholesale cancellations following the attacks have so far proven
to be exaggerated. A disturbing trend that I hope will not continue
is the loss of dance presenters. Key institutions in Colorado, Boston,
and Pittsburgh have ceased or reduced operations, leaving critical
gaps in the touring of dance.
We remain committed to providing as much support for dance touring
as possible. 2002 will represent the sixth year of the Endowment's
commitment to the National Dance Project. It is gratifying to see
the Endowment's investment of $3.5 million generate more than $12.0
in matching funds for the dance field.
In closing, I'd like to thank you for your continued support of
the Arts Endowment. Your political involvement has helped to keep
the agency alive, and the willingness of so many of you to serve
on panels and as resource people has helped to ensure an evaluation
process that remains committed to artistic excellence, diversity,
and the future of the field. Thank you very much.
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