Home Blog Page 160

George Jackson: What is Dance?

Editor
-
1
George Jackson: What is Dance?

“Mother, please don’t make a scene!” The young dancer’s dominant parent didn’t respond to her offspring’s plea. Throwing a quick glance at the recessive parent who, standing to the side somewhat stiffly, was clearly uncomfortable backstage (he wasn’t always at ease out front, in the theater’s public areas, either), the woman wouldn’t let the ballet school’s director go. “Why didn’t you give my child anything to dance?” she hissed and without waiting for an answer continued her attack. “That character stands, walks and emotes, but we’ve been paying good money (another glance at the recessive parent) for dance classes, dance shoes, costumes, more classes and there was not one dance step in that role!”

Others were beginning to gather backstage and the director decided on a minimal response. “Madame, the part is key to the ballet, why the choreographer made it for his own child! No one but a trained dancer could take those poses, proceed with the requisite bearing, or gesture with the crucial clarity.” The mother hadn’t expected so authoritative an answer delivered in a voice as chill as the London fog, and so she just stood glaring, giving the director the opportunity to walk away. Quickly the young dancer and the recessive parent steered the woman to the exit door.

On the drive home, the woman remained silent, but once there she reiterated her complaint on the telephone to her older offspring who was away at college. “Can you imagine, she wailed “I’m supposed to be satisfied with pumped-up posing and looking commanding as being dance? You’re majoring in arts, please tell me what your experts there at your fancy university say dance is!”. The college student was used to the mother’s rants, but this time her topic was intriguing. What would Plato say, what Aristotle, or Richard McKeon? Beauty and truth, likely, would figure in Plato’s response, beautiful movement that truly showed the nature of the soul. But what is beauty, what is truth in movement, let alone is there a soul? Plato’s way might illuminate an ideal, but getting a practical answer along that path would take forever. Nor would that pupil of Socrates answer the question of what dance is, all dance, just plain dance. He’d be hot about good dance, skilled dance, but not about the sort of dance a child might do if asked to dance.

The college student was aware of the pitfalls of empiricism. It wouldn’t suffice to ask one child to dance, or even several. A statistically significant number of the world’s children would have to be asked to dance infront of trained observers who then would have to determined what all the exertions had in common. Where, oh where, would the funding for this undertaking come from? In the absence of an angel or a grant, the college student decided to improvise and self-observe.

The first attempt was done to music. This dance had rhythm, the body cupping into itself and opening up, taking on line and yielding it again, repeating phrases of movement but building them too, letting them grow and develop. It took effort, though, not to become enslaved to the music and simply mirror its patterns and form. So the college student tried a second dance, one without music. That was difficult, though, for the movements linked themselves to another sound, that of the student’s own breathing. Exhaling and inhaling established a rhythm as dominant as music’s meter and perhaps even more so. With willpower the student was able to proceed against breath, counter to its pattern, but were the resulting movements still dance or just wayward motion? By accident the student stumbled on something other than a beat that could give the exertions a sense of order. Place and volume became the matrices and made motion seem a dance. If the student’s body took on a squatting, pulled-down stance, one that looked voluminous, every time it came close to one of the room’s corners that generated a pattern and transformed motion into dance. Was it possible, though, to dispense with both time (rhythm, beat, pulse) and space (location, position) and still dance? Could there be a fifth and sixth dimension, such as memory and sensuality, that might be used? And why, anyway, does the mind need a set of coordinates to see dancing?

The student decided to give Aristotle’s definition of dance a chance. That tutor to the young Alexander wrote (or, perhaps we have just lecture notes full of mistakes that one of his students jotted down) about the arts as modes of imitation and that bodily “rhythm alone, without harmony, is the means of the dancer’s imitations”. By the rhythms of the dancer’s attitudes, humans (and animals?) are represented and also shown is what they do and suffer. “The objects represented are actions” for both the actor and the dancer, but a difference between dance and drama is the “manner in which” the object is represented. Dance imitates actions by means of movements that give pleasure to the eyes. Ah, once again, the Greek weakness of insisting on good dance! And, apparently, Aristotle never saw a dancer who substituted space, memory or sensuality for rhythm. So the student decided to use Aristotle’s dialectic on a wider range of experience. Had the great analyst sat in more recent theaters, he might have written that dance is bodily movement “done for its own sake” that engenders a recognizable pattern. The pattern can be in any dimension, not just time (rhythm), but it must be recognizable and the movement must be done for movement’s sake, not for producing consumer goods or waging war or giving artificial respiration. Not ruled out is that dance movement can produce pleasure in the dancer and, when it is well done, also in the observer. The latter has a better chance of experiencing pleasure when watching professional dancers whose bodies, molded by training, diverge from the norm and whose patterns, enhanced by technique, are compelling. As an activity done for its own sake, must dance exclude making Plato’s truth and beauty manifest? Or, Vestris’s virtue? Didn’t that French superstar of a few centuries ago say that to be a great dancer one must be a good person because on stage one can not get away with lies? Ah, idealism! Yes, dance may do that too but at minimum the movement, done for movement’s sake, must generate just a pattern, a recognizable pattern!

The college student, although exhausted from dancing and thinking, phoned home. It was late at night now and at the other end of the line the dominant parent, woken from sleep, said hello with a worried tone. “Oh, its you! And you want to know whether your sibling stood like a dancer and walked like a dancer, whether I saw a pattern in all that business! I don’t care, I wanted to see that kid dance like a dancer!” And she slammed the receiver down.

FINIS (or continue ad absurdum)

George Jackson is.

Panel Discussion on Visual Arts Criticism

Editor
-
2
Panel Discussion on Visual Arts Criticism

[On Monday, January 4th, 2009 I attended an event, hosted by the Washington Project for the Arts, about arts coverage. The event was stimulated by Jessica Dawson’s recent article in the Washington Post, and pursuant responses, including by me. I brought my computer, and sat in the back of the room recording as much as I could of the conversation. The following is not a real transcription. But with the corrections and additions I received I’m encouraged to see that much of the event is captured in the words below. Any mistakes or mis-attributions are mine. As Kriston Capps wrote in a blog post some time ago: “I should emphasize that unless you see two of these— ” —you’re ultimately reading what I got out of it. So let’s nobody mistake my observations for proof of whatever your beef is.” – R. Bettmann]

Running for cover(age): A panel discussion on arts criticism in the DC area

Moderator: Kriston Capps
Panelists: Jeffry Cudlin, Isabel Manalo, Danielle O’Steen
When: Monday, January 4, 2010 from 6:30-8:00pm
Where: Capitol Skyline Hotel (lounge), 10 I Street SW, Washington, DC, 20024
(Free and open to the public)

Lisa Gold: This event was stimulated by an article in the Washington Post about Mera Rubell’s visit to a group of artist studios. The coverage reported some statements by Mera about the isolation of Washington’s artists. There have been a lot of responses to the piece in various online forums and social media sites, including about arts coverage in general, problems with it, critical discourse, and what we should do about it. We welcome all of you here tonight, and are grateful that so many of you showed up to discuss these issues. Just briefly, I’ll introduce the panelists, and moderator.

The moderator is Kriston Capps, a blogger and journalist who writes about art, music, and politics.

Jeffry Cudlin – artist, curator, critic, writes for citypaper and blogs at hatchets and skewers.

Isabel Manalo – au professor, represented by addison ripley, creator of thestudiovisit; her discussion on facebook (on the studiovisit.com page) really sparked this event

Danielle O’Steen – capitol file, art + auction, wash post express., also student in art history @GW specializing in modern art

K: I’m a little under the weather, which is too bad…. Even before this was announced I got an email from someone telling me that they were glad to hear I was moderating this panel, but that they had attended the same panel five years ago and nothing had changed so they wouldn’t be attending… (laugh) I know this kind of conversation has happened before. Washington has grown since I arrived here in 2002. The Do-It-Yourself art events and small spaces have grown and changed. As an aging critic those things are hard to keep up with… With Mera’s visit it was hard to say which Washington she was trying to keep up with: the Dupont circle and Bethesda galleries, or the broader scene. Which brings us to the question: how does journalism reflect this community today? Does it reflect it? I’ll start by saying that the Washington area sees coverage in the post, the citypaper, dcist, express, allournoise, byt, and many blogs – too numerous to mentions. My question is: where is there a lack? Where are things falling through the cracks?

J: As an occasional writer, artists, and curator: from all those standpoints I have different perspectives, or opinions. I am a jack of all trades… I’m an artist myself, an arts writer, and a curator. Basically I want people to write about art for two reasons: criticality and promotion. To move beyond self-satisfaction and move the discourse forward you need criticism. To get butts through the door you just want the coverage, too. There’s not a lot of real analysis happening right now, and there’s no one I would want to single out to do that. In terms of the actual coverage: I write occasionally for the city paper and I’ve seen the coverage shift to 250 word – or shorter – blurbs.

There’s tons of blogs all getting the same press releases and republishing them, but that isn’t the same as more in depth criticism. Frankly its sort of like: “did the Washington Post reviewer show?” And if they didn’t, then the event didn’t really happen. At the same time, lots of the Post pieces are presenting the public with a jazzy punchline to pull in readership highlighting something pretty simple. It really sort of is like, “Did Michael O’Sullivan or Jessica come in?”

There’s the real question of, can you be a professional critic anymore? Self satisfying and self-sustaining? It’s not like there’s a wall there, but as a journalist it’s hard to get pieces, and hard to get visibility and analysis. Both journalists and artists want the coverage. As a critic and an artist it’s a resume line to be published.

K – for Isabel: Do you think anything is being lost in the coverage?

I: There is a diverse range of what’s being written and how it’s being written about. Can there be something that could be addressed there? I think about the hierarchy that exists within the criticism for this city… I think we need more critical venues – beyond the blogs – to dilute the power the Washington Post has. I have more questions than answers. The reason why I started studiovisit.com was to open the door to consider the process, which can then inform my opinion of the artistic object.

K: For critics we want to go in and see objects but we’re supposed to be hands off of personal coverage…

I: For me perhaps its about connection toward understanding, rather than coverage. I’m not a critic but when I do critique what’s helped me to understand the work is getting to know the process behind the art object towards analysing the content and it’s context. The studio visit is not a critical forum, yet. Perhaps having that kind of connection might/would inform how they review work.

K: Someone might take away the sense from the conversation on your site that artists feel isolated. Do you feel that?

I: There is a huge difference between isolated and isolation. Isolation is a self-imposed being alone. Isolated implies a greater external factor forcing an individual or group outside the mainstream. It’s the feeling of being marginalized. I feel both. Rubell’s insights didn’t surprise me about sensing isolation from District artists. We are living in very different spaces and it’s essential if not inherent to being a good artist that we feel “isolation and loneliness”, as Mera states. However I do NOT feel isolated in my community. I feel the opposite.

K – to Jeffry: Do you feel isolated?

J: As an artist I don’t feel isolated, any more than geographically. It’s hard to find studio space… spaces tend to be pretty tucked away. The work is isolating in the sense that we work in these little places and need time to do that. Depending on what position one occupies we have a different answer… you can say there’s 100 galleries in dc or you can say they’re 12 and we’re both right. Lots of us are very invested. I only write about museums 4 times a year cause I’m also involved in trying to get people into shows. One of the questions I have – regarding the coverage, is about whether or not there a way to develop more rich, meaningful, content. So much of the coverage is amature, or extended event listing.

I: This discussion tonight really began on a social media site. How has social media changed criticism. We live in a culture of the ‘like’ button, but no ‘dislike’ button. On Facebook the space between artist and critic has shrunk. I wonder if there is an obligation to perpetuate the virtual “friending in the physical” which may lead to a lot of false positivity toward each other. How does this affect writing critically?

K: Is there any way to help one another? Is there something to criticism feeding community? As a writer we’re all kind of lonely hunters, finding and pitching, and writing our pieces.

J: We see each other at night at opening after opening. Who is our audience? Are we writing for each other, or for the gallery owner, or for the audience we don’t know? We do feel like we have to be self-sustaining and self-promoting. As a writer you want to interest people and engage not just people who would be reading anyway. You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.

K: A lot of people write critical/investigative features… which you have to keep at arm’s length.

M: I think it’s ok to get upset, and also to start discussions…

K: Do you think the arm’s length is more of a problem here in dc?

M: No, I just think it’s more apparent.

K: In comparing New York and D.C., Mera gave me a strong sense of a huge bell curve gap between the artists she’s met and the artists at the National Gallery. It’s pretty profound how large that divide is, and how much of a looming presence she saw that to be.

D: I don’t think there is an impenetrable force here. There are so many artists struggling to get through in New York, too.

K: … and we’ve seen shows at Gagosian that are similar to museum.

D: I don’t think DC has to become New York. It’s a different animal. A different machine.

J: The DC Art Scene is like a ladder with all the middle rungs missing. Someone told me that. I think it’s a ladder with two sets of rungs missing. There seems to be no clear path from a to b to c. From getting into a larger institution that supports artists, to finding gallery representation, to “I want to be written about by someone who actually sees.” And Arlington Arts Center is trying to do that. There are a number of local institutions trying to do that.

Galleries and non-profits exist for different reasons. I think about “why does that show exist”. You can do things at non-profits that don’t have to sell. Shows should exist for different reasons. If I want to convince a gallerist to want something, how do I do that if I’m not making traditional object/drawing things?

K: Because of the way our municipal and cultural centers are created there’s an interesting parsing out of Silver Spring/Arlington/Reston/Rockville… of different communities. Do DC’s geography and disparate community organizations affect our overall community?

I: I don’t think New York is any different. There is Chelsea as the center of the art market, but in terms of the local arts community in New York most of it is not in Chelsea. There really are lots of different places. I find it exciting that we have the diversity here and not just giant warehouses all over the place.

K: I think it takes one small pot and puts it into many smaller pools…

J: it makes it a little tricky when you’re coveting people who are doing things somewhere else. I strive to program a particular kind of contemporary art. I think it makes it difficult when you have a lot people who see you a certain way and you may not think of them in that same way. I think there’s a fear of programming an artist at more than one place locally in one year… I think you can get a kind of critical mass… and if there’s different things you’re attempting… if there’s clearly definable reasons some gallerists are able to accept artists being in multiple places at the same time.

K: So you think the area is big enough to support an Arlington arts community, and a Bethesda arts community….

I: I think the federal institutions can play a role galvanizing things together. For instance the Corcoran show a little while ago that featured local contemporary artists. Should the Smithsonian institutions have an obligation to connect to the local community? There’s the artists’ residency at the Hirshorn… is it enough to only have one artist a year?

D: If everything is separated you’re gonna lose something in the mix. I don’t want necessarily a Chelsea, but something that shows DC’s strength. I think certain elements are missing. An auction. An art fair. Not that we need that. I actually missed the DC Art Fair, it happened before I arrived. Not that we need to mimic Miami etc. but you need something to attract collectors. To bring the market for a global/national art scene.

An audience member: There’s a difference between where people make art, but Mera’s reaction was partly to the geographic isolation of the studios which is in fact not uncommon to many communities. In terms of a center of gravity to where studios are located or where galleries are showing…

K: We talked a little about what artists do, and need to do. What about what writers do and need to do? Do New York publications shut the door on non-New York coverage?

D: I have to admit that when I was editing in New York I didn’t want to cover dc… I think it’s a matter of pushing as a freelance writer. You’re also following/fighting with your colleagues for a story. I think for New York magazines a lot of them are really suffering. And there are alternatives for coverage, but I’m personally very attached to magazines and hand-able publications, and I think I’m not alone.

K: At the guardian there was an absolute blood-letting at the end of this past year. I still have connection there, but it’s not what it was. They’re simply not listening as closely to what’s happening over here. Is it important to have coverage in the big glossies?

D: As a writer, I was always nervous about writing or introducing a new artist to the public…. You want to write something meaningful….

K: Does it mean the same if something is reviewed in the Post or on the web?

I: There’s a history with the printed paper… you can talk about the Post and everything else. When I was preparing for a class I went and looked back through old papers. There is something about local magazines — Chicago has a great local culture, and magazines which feed into the national scene. There’s a bit of a micro economy with that.

J: There’s something about print that you can hold onto. To be published like that… it makes artists feel better about the themselves. Similar to us creating our little objects and hoping someone will buy them… Is it meaningful outside of gallery culture?

K: Our editors are trying to push to the web to capture new audience.

D: Magazines and online versions are not the same. Not the same attention to detail or value to each word. Most of times when I write something for online publication it’s not touched. Being edited is encouraging. When you’re not touched, especially for online publications, there’s a sense that maybe even the editor isn’t reading it.

V: I’m a little frustrated I feel like we’re dancing around an issue. Was this inappropriate coverage? Should studio visits for an auction be covered? It was great publicity move by WPA but the writing was mean-spirited and sycophantic. We’re kind of dancing around: was this even news?

K: I felt this was news-worthy. I found out about it, pitched it to my editor. I needed an angle. I got one, they took the piece, and that was that. With any story there can always be questions about editorializing… People may ask about whether the coverage, or the opinion, is warranted or not.

M: The Rubell’s really do have this power when they walk through a space, in Miami, New York, or DC. The phenomena of her coming is just a huge deal. It is news-worthy. The question is in how the story was framed.

I: There’s a larger thing about the dialogue we want to be involved in – in terms of arts dialogue. It’s not that way with the Times in New York. We worry locally because we want people to have read about the show. But in terms of what happens in Art Forum… what we want is to get more involved in these broader conversations.

D: I write for the metro express. There’s a hope of getting out to the larger world, not just the art world.

K: How do you access the art community? I read what I read. And I read Art magazines cover to cover when they arrive and I care about what I read deeply. But I’ve never met another subscriber to Art Papers (big laugh). But in this room there are lots of Post subscribers, or at least readers.

Jayme Mclellan: I think we are moving away from a place where the Post is the only venue. But right now they do have a huge amount of power and influence. It’s dumb-founding. The problem I keep having… A friend of mine said that the Post in the arts section keeps telling you how the game of baseball is played, over and over. We want people to understand, but they dumb it down more and more. There’s not any meat. And that’s what the dc arts community is getting served by. I hope for reviews, and I want that critical dialogue in the paper. But there’s no way to control it.

J: I think the Washington Post is written for readers at a 6th grade level… The City Paper is more for someone who’s had a year of college and is now drunk somewhere… more elevated dialogue and a few jokes thrown in. But even if something is killed in the Post it’s noteworthy.. it helps get people in the door.

Another audience member : With the decline of coverage in the country it’s encouraging to have any coverage. There are dumb and great pieces. And it’s great to have this community brought together in that way.

K: Journalism lost 45k jobs last year. That’s some steel mill kind of stuff right there.

I: Media has to exist but the question is how can the artist benefit from that kind of writing? I sympathize with the Post in that they have to ultimately sell the paper, but there must be a way to write their reviews that connect to the artist community in a constructive way.

D: It’s general interest… What is our reason for writing, and what is your reason for making things? Are stories always covering the negative aspect of things? Why do we write? Why do we create? Do they need to be together? Is the purpose to uplift? To bring down? To sell stories? To sell art?

K: As journalist its not my job to create community. I have to sell papers…. Part of what made the story is that Mera is a great white shark.

I: We had a real opportunity to hear a collector’s voice and we may not like what we heard, but we did hear something.

D: Is the article interpretation? Or was it the story? But was it accurate? Was it her opinion? Every paper wants an angle. Something edgier, tougher to read, cause that’s what people want to read. I try not to get too invested in what I write because every editor has a completely different style. I have to internalize what that is and send my work to the one editor that it’s right for.

J: Editor’s can help you shape that.

K: You need to be your own editor because once you send it out you can’t control what happens to it.

Holly Bass: Editors tend to slant toward the snarky and the negative. It’s hard not to toe that line. I’m aware of that bias and it helps me nagivate a little better. Mera was only supposed to pick twelve artists, and she picked sixteen. Which is great. And that wasn’t talked about a lot. I’d compare DC to Brooklyn over Chelsea. For my friends in Brooklyn it sucks and is incredibly difficult — rent is high, there arent’ many show opportunities…

K: Which brings up the question – we do we think we should we appear at the National Gallery, or the Philips collection?

Ryan Hill: We need to create a mythology around where we live. There are grad students here and, after school, they leave. They go to New York because they think it’s better. But it’s not.

Audience Member: I am on the board of an arts center in Rockville: Metropolitan Center for Visual Arts. We can’t get anyone there to review our shows, and we can’t get anyone there to see the shows. The bottom line is, if we don’t get people out there, we don’t get artists noticed…

K: There are some tips to getting coverage… As journalists we do pay attention to each other. We’re each other’s audience (as far as we know.) For organizers it can be a frustration but the question is who should I get attention from and start there.

Audience member: It would be nice to go a little deeper, not just try for superficial coverage though… The analogy of the ladder.

— At this point I stopped taking notes —

Seeing Red: A review of Sarah Kaufman’s review of Guangdong

Editor
-
7
Seeing Red: A review of Sarah Kaufman’s review of Guangdong

Sarah Kaufman’s review of the performance “Other Suns” (‘Suns’ revolves around hopes for a changing China, Oct. 31 2009), a co-production between San Fransisco-based Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and China’s Guangdong Modern Dance Company, revealed a shallow understanding of Chinese culture. While her criticisms of the piece were valid, she made an inappropriate leap in her generalizations about how Chinese culture and society as a whole were responsible for those failures.

I agree with Kaufman’s assessment that the Guangdong Modern Dance Company’s (GMDC) section of the trilogy lacked emotional commitment and consisted mostly of pretty movement by nice technicians. However, Kaufman blames Chinese society for the dancers’ lack of expression, quipping “Expressiveness isn’t easy in a society where individual freedoms are still dodgy.”

The performers’ lack of depth resulted not from China’s Great Oppressive Society — a hackneyed cliché which articles like Kaufman’s only help to sustain — but from the same immaturity found in young dancers in any country. The six GMDC dancers on the Clarice Smith Center stage in October are some of the company’s youngest. The dancer bios in the program reflected that most of these performers had joined the company within the last two years. Due to the project’s limited budget, the full company was not able to participate in the US tour. Half of the company, in fact the more mature and experienced dancers, were performing other GMDC repertoire in Europe and Taiwan.

This past July I had the opportunity to enjoy the GMDC section of “Other Suns” performed with the full company in the annual Guangdong Modern Dance Festival in China. In contrast to the version we saw here, that performance of this same piece contained an admirably deep level of commitment and energy. If Kaufman’s goal was to write a more encompassing article about the larger topic of modern dance in China, she could have researched footage, easily available on YouTube, of other GMDC works like “Upon Calligraphy” or works by other modern dance companies in China like the Beijing Modern Dance Company. If she had, she would have found performances of profound expressiveness and emotional depth by performers like Ma Kang, Xing Liang, Tao Ye, and others.

os_10Kaufman asserts that the performance made her consider “the challenges of teasing capitalist narcissism out of a culture of collectivism,” and that this is somehow a prerequisite for better modern dance in China. Not only does this draw a fallacious connection between one dance performance and all of Chinese culture, it also reveals an inaccurate understanding of that culture. Since the establishment of the one-child policy and with rising affluence in larger cities, China in fact is now experiencing what some academics call the “Little Emperor” phenomenon. When asked their goal in life, most young Chinese professionals from this “spoiled” generation will tell you point blank: “To make money.” China today is a culture of capitalist narcissists. This is not what was lacking on stage. Capitalist narcissism does not make good modern dance; experience and maturity do.

The rigors of dance training often produce technical masters who are emotionally vacant, but this phenomenon is not unique to China. Young western dancers can be equally uninteresting to watch as they show off flashy technique before they have gained the depth of expression found in mature performers. Had GMDC’s “A-team” been on stage at the University of Maryland and not on tour in Germany or Taiwan, we would have seen more of these moments from the Chinese side of the co-production. Kaufman’s analysis does a disservice to American understanding of contemporary China, and Chinese contemporary dance.

To see Kaufman’s review, click here. To see Guangdong Founder Willy Tsao’s reply to Kaufman published in the Post, click here.

photographer Daniel Schwartz[1]Alison M. Friedman is the founder/director of Ping Pong Productions (www.pingpongarts.org) which brings together Chinese and international performing artists, scholars and audiences for creative collaboration and exchange. She was International Director of the Beijing Modern Dance Company from 2005 until 2008 when she was hired by Oscar-winning composer Tan Dun to be General Manager of his company Parnassus Productions, Inc. The leading expert on modern dance in China, Ms. Friedman came to Beijing in 2002 on a Fulbright Fellowship to research the development of modern dance in the Middle Kingdom. In addition to lecturing on the art form in both China and abroad, she has conducted research for the Royal Netherlands Embassy and the Asian Cultural Council, and her writing has appeared in Dance Magazine (USA). She has worked as consultant for the US Embassy in China, Columbia University, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, as well as other overseas dance and theater companies touring the Middle Kingdom. From 2003-2005 she hosted a live music program on China Radio International (CRI), China’s largest government-run radio station.

Beau Finley: What is Music

Editor
-
0
Beau Finley: What is Music

At its most basic, music is the arrangement of tones with melody, rhythm, and a sense of intent (by listener or creator) so as to be discernible from other sounds.

Beau Finley is an attorney, ninja, and rockstar who is infatuated with the interrelations of sounds. He is most often found involved with Fuzzy Panda (www.fuzzy-panda.com) and its sister site Panda Fuzz (www.pandafuzz.com).

Washington Ballet’s Program at THEARC by Katrina Toews

Editor
-
6
Washington Ballet’s Program at THEARC by Katrina Toews

Thanks to a unique partnership between the District and the developer William C. Smith & Co., the non-profit Building Bridges Across the River was able to construct a state of the art 110,000 square foot community center on 16.5 acres in SE Washington, DC (Ward 8.) The Town Hall Education Arts and Recreation Campus (THEARC) opened in 2005, offering a safe haven for youth and families. Approximately 7,000 children live within one square mile of THEARC; more than half of them live at, or below, the poverty line. Building Bridges Across the River continues to manage THEARC; THEARC houses ten nonprofit agencies, including a branch of The Washington School of Ballet.

The Washington Ballet’s main campus is in Northwest Washington, DC. In order to appropriately program for this new campus, and community, we commissioned a one-year exploratory study. Callahan Consulting for the Arts conducted the study, meeting with Ward 8 leaders from politics, education, the arts, and religious practice. The findings helped us understand community expectation and perception, and engaged us with some “what to expect” scenarios.

The Washington Ballet opened its doors at THEARC with one full-time employee and two part-time dance teachers. I was hired in 2005 as the Education Director, and then in 2006 became Director of TWB@THEARC. We opened the studios with a month of free classes in the summer of 2005. Eight hundred and thirty people, ages 5 – 55, attended classes during that month. Our first school year began with over 200 students walking through our doors; we expected 60-90. The first year came and went with much excitement and exuberance for the opportunity “to take dance classes so close in the neighborhood,” but the excitement waned after the first year, replaced with the hard work of training each and every student.

We essentially have two groups of students: students who want pre-professional dance training, and students with no prior ballet experience interested in exploring the art. As we watch the different skill levels of these two groups diverge, staff, faculty, and parents wrestle with questions about the direction and quality of the program. “Is the training at the SE location on the same level as the NW location? Are the teachers receiving the same technical training?” And, since the Ballet opened a campus in Old Town, Alexandria in 2009: “Are we expecting the same things from student’s at all three campuses?”

Last year, as we marked our fourth year of programs, we engaged in a capacity building study with Katherine Coles Associates. We were excited to discover that staff, faculty, and parents all wanted the highest level of training for our students. The study revealed a clear direction to take our programs to the next level of intensity and excellence. This meant systemic change in process and behavior for all involved. We introduced a mandatory parent meeting in September to discuss expectations of students and parents, and to set program goals for the coming year. The school director from the NW campus visits the SE campus weekly, working with faculty and students to ensure standards are rigorous and consistent. And, we now have monthly meetings between the Washington Ballet’s Executive Director, Artistic Director, School Director, and me (THEARC Director.)

My professional goal is to unlock hidden potential, and open eyes to an array of future possibilities. My greatest joys emerge from the constant dialogue with my students, their parents, and our teachers. The families who attend classes at The Washington School of Ballet do not want “handouts.” They want and expect a “level playing field” with the Northwest Campus in terms of quality education, resources, and access. It has always been our goal to build relationships with THEARC Community. Relationships are built on trust and trust is built through disclosure and transparency, a give and take of open conversation. I hope that THEARC program will emerge as a guiding light in dance education for the nation.

Katrina-Toews--new-Tony-Powell-3KATRINA TOEWS is a professional dancer, choreographer, teacher, Pilates trainer and arts administrator. Over the years, however, Ms. Toews has always loved working with children most. Ms. Toews was first hired to teach at The Washington School of Ballet under founder Mary Day. She enjoyed the children so much that she began work in the education programs as well. She was the originator of the programs for The Washington Ballet @ THEARC as has been at the SE campus since its inception.

Ms. Toews holds an MA in Dance from American University as well as a BA in Fine Arts and Elementary Education from Bethel College in Kansas. She trained with Mimi Legat, Peter Stark, Mandy Jorgenson, and Denise Celestin, among others. Ms. Toews has danced with bosmadance, Sister’s Trousers and Carla and Co., and founded her own contemporary company, K2 Dance in 2005. Her work has been described by Washington Post critics as “solidly crafted quality” with choreography that “stands out.”

Ms. Toews has presented work on dance and education at various conferences across the U.S. and is a member of the National Dance Education Organization. Ms. Toews will receive the 2010 Young Alumni award in Kansas for her work with youth in the field of dance.

1...159160161...189Page 160 of 189