Coming to Washington Next Week? Here Are Some Tips
If you wish to conduct legislative visits in Washington, D.C., outside of Arts Advocacy Day, Dance/USA’s Government Affairs Department will schedule your meetings, prepare you with talking points and leave-behind materials, and accompany you during the meetings.
Ms. Lockhart Goes to Washington: Legislative Visits Made Simple
It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture when we stay so busy putting out fires and keeping a dozen balls in the air at once. But as dancers, arts managers, and company directors, we shouldn’t discount the importance of forging and solidifying relationships with our government officials on the local, state, and national levels.
Totally Non-Non-Non-Partisan Dude!
It’s important to remember that arts advocates are not only lobbying for increased appropriations for the National Endowment for the Arts. We’re also working on policies for tax, technology, education, and international exchange.
Telling Your Dance Company’s Story Through Social Media
Someone should choreograph a dance about the sweeping importance of social media and the ups and downs of trying to manage a social media presence. No sooner does an arts organization begin to use “the next best thing” when something new, shinier, and sexier takes its place.
From the Sun King to Twitter: Ballet Branding, Then and Now
American Ballet Theatre soloist Daniil Simkin examines individual branding and marketing: “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.”
Designing a Safer Future for Dancers
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.
Life Lessons from Pina and ‘Pina’
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.
How Long? The Life Span of a Dance Company
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.”
Things I Learned About Artistry at the 2012 Dance Forum in NYC
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.
Creating an Artist: What Can We Learn From Europe?
It has often been remarked that “Europe breeds artistry,” and that, to a certain extent, European dancers have an edge compared to their American counterparts. In defense of the American dancers, it is noted that they possess grit, tenacity, and a hunger that exceeds that of some of their European equivalents, yet the elusive artistic core lags or appears untapped in our culture. Certainly the environment of Europe provides a cultural banquet to nourish artistic growth, but does the European approach to training dancers incorporate more diversity, which in turn can contribute to greater creative growth? If so, can American dance schools fashion strategies based on this assumption?