So this article from First Things (I know, weird, eh?) seems especially timely. Using Philadelphia-area native Lauren Zaleta (pictured here), who’s training at the Joffrey Ballet School, as a window into the dance world, writer and former dancer Sara Hamdan roots around in the challenges facing the dance world. It’s frank, and a little harrowing. Hamdan writes:

“American dance culture isn’t just struggling. To some observers, its diagnosis seems to be especially grim, perhaps even terminal: Dance is a victim of inherent weaknesses made yet more dire by the profession’s financial woes. Mounting deficits, shrinking audiences, and less critical support have combined to cause an entire art form to fear its fate in ways that other performing arts do not.

“Already less popular than other cultural offerings, even on a good day, dance relies far more heavily on audience support than does its competition. A dance aficionado can’t download a performance on an iPod and enjoy it in the car during a long drive. Dance demands a different kind of interaction with an audience; it takes more effort and concentration—and money—for a dance devotee to end up in a theater or concert hall with a group of dancers and watch them sweat, listen to their breathing, and marvel at the command they have over their bodies. Dance is an all-or-nothing proposition for its audience, and this may end up being a principal reason for its demise.

“Unfortunately, it’s not just the worst possible time in dance history for audiences. It is, simply put, the bleakest it has been for the dance industry itself in nearly a century.”

Yikes. (Still, it’s a great feature and very much worth a read.) Dance is a huge part of what we do at Live Arts and Philly Fringe, and on good days, I feel optimistic, and quite excited about the future of dance here. But professional careers—making your living from dance—do seem increasingly hard to come by.

What do you think? Is dance in Philly endangered? Do young dancers and choreographers have a shot at not just an artistic career, but a professional one? Please feel invited to discuss in the comments, or if you want to share longer thoughts, email me responses for publication at nicholas[at]pafringe[dot]com.

–Nicholas Gilewicz

Eun Jung regularly performs and teaches in Mexico, but the couple’s most recent trip was the result of a fortuitous connection. When Eun Jung and Guillermo’s company Da Da Dance Project performed at a Festival in Mexico City at the Teatro de la Danza, and Patricia Aulestia, an important figure in the Mexican dance scene, happened to be in the audience and recommended them to perform in the Festival Internacional de Danza Contemporánea Avant-Garde in Mérida.

“The director of the festival hadn’t even seen our work,” says Eun Jung.

Their trip (May 4 through June3) began in Mérida, a city in the Yucatán famous for its colonial architecture, including one of the oldest cathedrals in North America. In the festival they performed the piece getting UP by Brooklyn choreographer Luke Gutgsell and an improvisational piece titled Exclamación. They shared the stage with local dance companies and international artists like Antonio Quiles from Spain. From there they traveled to Oaxaca, a hotspot for Mexican arts and culture. Besides the country being Guillermo’s homeland, the couple has a special tie to Mexico–they met in Mexico City four years ago when Guillermo took a class that Eun Jung was teaching with choreographer Mijail Rojas. Eun Jung says that their romantic relationship developed more naturally at first than their artistic one, because of their divergent aesthetics and experiences.

“He came from a more formal dancing background and I was into more experimental choreographic work. There was a lot of crashing at first,” she says of their collaboration.

When Eun Jung set a work on Mexican dancers in Mérida, however, she didn’t feel this sense of “crashing” in the process. While there she set a work on the local dance company Tumaka’t, a group of four “excellent dancers” directed by Vania Duran, whose leadership Eun Jung says makes the company very open-minded.

“The dancers were very clear, easy–they would do anything I asked them to,” she explains. “Maybe it’s because I’m coming from the outside, but they’re more attentive, like they’re trying to really get something out of me. They have this willingness.” She plans on returning in July to put the finishing touches on the piece, and the company will premiere it in August.

Guillermo also set a work on the company Tatzudanza in Mérida, and in Oaxaca the couple was interviewed about their work by local channel 9′s Arte en Punto program entirely in Spanish, Eun Jung’s third language. They also taught workshops for the public. Eun Jung says one of the most fulfilling moments of the tour was when a 65-year-old woman came with her daughter to take her class and expressed her appreciation afterword.

“She said she felt connected to herself again.” Eun Jung laughs, “then she kept asking us, ‘Is my daughter too fat to dance?!’”

Eun Jung and Guillermo did find a little time to do the kind of beachside relaxation that a trip to Mexico usually brings to mind, savoring the comida yucateca and unwinding in natural mineral pools.

“The sense of time there is very different . . .” says Eun Jung, “it makes me feel like I’m gonna get lost from the world.”

–Ellen Freeman

Performance photo by Egophoto and others courtesy of Eun Jung Choi.

“To feel, look like, and have a million bucks.”

“To have sex with 50 Cent.”

These are just some of the responses scrawled on the notecards that Olive Prince hands out to friends, family, and even people she meets on the street, asking them to write or draw their answer to the same question: “What do you desire?”

Olive is using the notecards as Post Secret-esque research for her new dance I desire which will be performed in 8 (eight choreographers / eight new works) at the Live Arts Festival. The piece is centered around the idea of humans becoming machines, inspired by Olive’s observation of people rushing to work as if on an assembly line. She imagines that flesh and bone and individuality and desire are lost as people “go through their day with blinders on.”

Olive is not playing the role of enlightened artist, free from the 9-to-5, however. “I’m part of it,” she admits. “I just wonder what would happen if we messed it up.”

The choreographer, whose day job for the past two years has been teaching dance at Drexel University, is similarly conscious of how the images that first inspire her work may not be evident to an audience. Olive uses what she calls “movement metaphors” to transform the literal images in her head into the movements that the audience sees.

“The way you take a movement and repeat it, shape it, and find variation takes on a meaning, like a phrase in a song.” As she speaks about the inspiration behind I desire she shuffles through the notecards, then mentions images as vastly different as “a tree that’s very much underground, very rooted,” and “family snapshots” all in one breath.

“I don’t even really like talking about it, because most people, when they watch it, will have no idea that it came from what I’m talking about.”

After the jump: Olive’s desires.
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There are some people who make friends wherever they go, and I get the sense that Shavon Norris, one of the eight choreographers presenting new work in the upcoming Live Arts show 8 (eight choreographers / eight new works), is one of them. As soon as she walks into La Citadelle, the little café at 16th and Pine where she suggested we meet, the owner spies her and whisks over to give her a hug. They chat for a moment, her smile almost as big as her dangling pink earrings. For someone who just came from a full workday and is heading to an evening of rehearsal, she has an awful lot of energy.

Shavon has been on the move since she was kid growing up in the Bronx. All the children in her family—quite a flock, thanks to her great-grandmother’s ten children—grew up dancing. Shavon had an uncle who was a passionate dancer and dance teacher, so “it was almost like the family business,” she says.

Uncle Timmy, as she and her cousins knew him, was Shavon’s mother’s best friend and a big part of her life. When he died from AIDS complications when Shavon was 14, the joy she found in dance was shattered. “I was heartbroken,” she says. She didn’t dance again until college, when she was moved by a performance of Bill T. Jones‘ Still/Here, a piece about people with terminal illnesses. “That stayed with me for a long time,” she says. “It was like a black hole inside me started to fill up.”

Shavon had set out for Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York as a biology major and pre-med hopeful. On paper, at least. “I didn’t really have options . . . I come from a single parent home, and when you went to college, you went to earn an income,” she says. Shavon also double-minored in English and math—proof that when she calls herself a “recovering overachiever,” she’s not making things up. When Still/Here inspired her to get back in the studio, she enrolled in dance classes at school. But even when she decided against pursuing medicine after all, dance didn’t stand out as a career path.

After graduating, Shavon worked as a legal assistant on Wall Street (a stint she delicately calls “informative”) and as a resident director and academic counselor at her alma mater, Manhattanville. She wasn’t sure where to go next, but she did know she was unhappy. The Peace Corps was starting to seem like the best option.

“Then the 9/11 attacks happened,” she says. “It rocked me . . . it shook me from the inside out.” Watching walls and lives crumble made Shavon want to live her life differently. “I made living, and happiness, my priorities. I wanted to be a dancer.”

She applied for several dance MFA programs and went on to enroll at Temple. Now, five years after earning her master’s, Shavon is both a dancer and an educator. By day she teaches dance and movement to kindergarten through 5th grade classes at Independence Charter School in Center City (Click here for blog coverage with a sneak peek into Shavon’s classroom!)

Shavon is also one of Philly’s most exciting up-an-coming choreographers, with a vision and process that reflect her inquisitive personality.

Shavon often explains that her dancemaking is inspired by the tradition of testifying that she discovered growing up in an African-American Baptist church. Testifying can take many forms, but the element Shavon always held onto was the link she felt to strangers when they spoke about the divine in their lives. “Just because they shared something, a secret thing, I was instantly connected to them, even if I didn’t even know them,” she says.

When Shavon starts creating a piece, she has her dancers share their own testimonies. She films each dancer as she asks questions or provides words for reflection. Then, the group moves to the dance studio, and Shavon plays back the audio footage of each dancer’s own voice. The dancers respond physically, exploring movements and becoming the first witnesses to their stories. Sometimes the process is deeply emotional. Shavon relishes the sneak peek—”I’m a little nosy. I get to be a voyeur. But what I’m really looking for is connection.”

The second ingredient in Shavon’s vision ties to her interest in biology. “When my uncle died, I knew it was something physical that happened to me. I felt it inside . . . my body shifted.” She says the human body is full of information that flows in all directions; our bodies affect our lives and vice versa.

She points out my straight, straw-colored hair, and then her own shiny black ‘do. “This is in our DNA,” she says. “It’s in our bodies, and just think how it changes how we experience things, how people react to us . . . what stories we live.” And it goes both ways—our stories also become embedded in our skin and bones. Shavon tells me that I may be 22, but the 12-year-old, and the 5-year-old, and the 3-year-old me are still alive. “It doesn’t go away. It stays in you,” she says.

Shavon has recently taken up painting—she’s into huge and tiny canvasses, but nothing in between. She’s a closet sci-fi geek, gushing about Octavia Butler‘s novels and her Twilight Zone marathons as a child. And in the future, she’d like to work with and teach people in nontraditional settings, like in a retirement community or a homeless shelter. Shavon says there are too few hours in the day to do everything, but she doesn’t seem rattled by that. “I’m trying to honor time,” she says, “and make peace with it.” In the studio, at the front of a classroom, behind her video camera, it doesn’t matter—the clock, like so much in Shavon’s busy collage of a life, is not a roadblock but a mystery begging to be solved.

–Mara Miller

Photos by Josh McIlvain and Lindsay Browning



Still, after fostering contemporary dance in Rittenhouse Square for 30 years, it is a time of transition for Susan Hess. We thought it was a good time to catch up with Susan about where she’s been, and where she’s planning to go.

Having spent a year traveling around the world in the early 1970s, Susan Hess returned to New York.

“It seemed gruesome to me,” she says.

After growing up in Baltimore, Susan studied dance at Juilliard and lived in New York for nine years, where she worked with people like Jose Limon and organizations like Dance Theater Workshop. But when she came back, she says funding for new work and money from the State Department that had sent artists on international tours had both dried up.

On her travels, she met a woman in Greece who invited Susan to come visit Philadelphia.
She moved here, met her husband (architect and woodworker Richard Herskovitz, who helped construct Verizon Hall), married, and stuck around. In 1981, she founded Susan Hess Dance Company, which just completed its final season in its longtime home on Sansom Street in Rittenhouse Square.

But fear not: the company lives on.

Susan Hess Dance Company hasn’t been merely a performing organization; in addition to developing young dancers and choreographers, they’ve also worked hard to educate Philadelphians about the history of dance.

In 1984 the Pennsylvania Humanities Council awarded the company its first-ever grant, and Susan put together a living history series. Five American dance pioneers told stories of their lives and careers, including Anna Sokolow (known for her pieces Rooms and Dreams) and May O’Donnell (an early member of the Martha Graham Dance Company).

“Anna performed Rooms and Dreams. She was a tiny rebellious woman. Her mother called her ‘corva,’ which in Yiddish means whore. [Anna] encouraged stealing! We couldn’t afford anything [when we lived in New York], so we’d break in. Our teachers would be performing! We’d have to go.”

In 2001, the company reprised the living history series with “A Look Back, A Leap Forward,” featuring six other dance pioneers including Trisha Brown, a founding member of Judson Dance Theater and the Grand Union dance collective.

Even with such heavyweights, Susan says that getting traction for dance performances and discussions can be difficult.

“It’s not an easy city. It’s hard to do it here.”

Nonetheless, out of that second series emerged the masters exchange program.

“Carmen [de Lavallade, one of the featured dancers in "A Look Back, A Leap Forward"] was our first. We started with a half-day program, then moved to a full day, then twice a season.”

Emerging choreographers work with these established figures. In 2009-2010, participants (pictured above) included Meg Foley, Erin Foreman-Murray (also pictured right), and Megan Mazarick. For the 2010-2011 program, which will take place at the Performance Garage, two new choreographers—Raphael Xavier and Bronwyn MacArthur—will join Mazarick, who is returning for another year.

“It’s a lab, a research-and-development kind of program for them,” says Susan. “Usually the choreographers are in the program from two to three years.”

There is no formal application process for the exchange program. People have to get in touch with Susan directly.

“I don’t choose choreographers by video. Dance is here and gone. Throughout a year, I see everybody who gets in touch. I’m the curator, both for good and for bad.”

I asked Susan what she looked for in young choreographers.

“Somebody who’s in their body, but not technically. Movement has to be in the body; it can’t be in a brain. If I see work that has originality, that’s not generic. Not perfect. I hate perfect work.”

The program has a surprising component of something akin to lifestyle education. Susan says that many of her “kids,” as she calls them, let the business of piecing together income interfere with the rich stuff of life.

“How can you make art when you’re so bound up by your have-tos? Do you cook? Do you sleep? Do you read a book? Do you make love?

“Isn’t this our world? We live in total fear. We’re terrified the storm is coming. I grew up with air raid drills.”

When asked about Lucinda Childs’s piece Dance, Susan lights up.

“I fall in love with work when my body wants to do it,” something Susan says she felt when seeing Dance last fall.

“You’re so lucky to see it for the first time! I said to Lucinda that I was so glad I saw it twice.”

As a mentor in Susan’s Masters Exchange program, Lucinda Childs looked to her own past.

“She did exactly what they did at Judson,” says Susan. “She did a grid, a deck of cards. She said that if you find a Picasso in your mother’s house, you don’t throw it away,” referring to the effectiveness of the old technique.

When Susan announced the final performances at her former Sansom Street studio, Childs sent a note and said she’d try to make it. And she did, with a surprise.

“When I picked her up, she said, ‘Do you want me to dance?’” Susan says, pantomiming astonishment. Susan asked her if they could surprise the audience with Childs’s performance.

“She came out among the chairs like fairy dust. The theatricality of it!”

In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Marilyn Jackson wrote, “To an excerpt of long-time collaborator Philip Glass’ music, she pranced forward like a fox, staring at the floor as if it were prey and pushing the heavy air before her aside, redefining the space. Then—basta!—the hand snapped up, a magic moment over as she vanished.”

Childs turns 70 this month.

“You see this maturity, and these simple articulations that are just heavenly. The ego is out of it. And this is how the studio’s always worked. When Simone Forti came, she asked, ‘Can I do an evening performance?’ In my one-room schoolhouse! It was just this spontaneous. I’m going to miss my home. It’s had an amazing amount of influence. The molecules there are very filled and significant.”

More than anything else, Susan tried to cultivate a comfort with experimentation and exploration at the studio, something that she says will continue as operations move to the Performance Garage.

“The gift is of freedom. I say to [students], if you’re doing something, think of it in a real way, but an imaginative way. But you don’t start with a grain of rice when you’re making dinner. Know who you are.”

–Nicholas Gilewicz

Photos courtesy of Susan Hess

Ajiaco is a traditional Cuban stew, but those of us who came to the Live Arts Studio yesterday afternoon weren’t there to eat. Boán, the Cuban-born choreographer whose new dance Decadere will be performed at the Live Arts Festival, led a free dance improvisation workshop for dancers and non-dancers ages 18-25.

I took tap lessons for nine sequin-spangled years of my childhood and was on the dance team in middle school–I coveted the monogrammed team sweatshirt–but I’ve never done any kind of dance that doesn’t involve A LOT of smiling and a bouquet from mom after the recital. So when I heard the words “dance improvisation” I got a picture in my head of myself, alone on stage . . . peeing my pants.

But when the tiny-but-punchy Boán began to lead the nine dancers and non-dancers in a series of movement exercises, my perceived need for a diaper vanished. At first, all we did was walk around in a circle–how could I mess that up? Then Boán layered more elements onto our basic movements, like linking arms to follow other dancers and then spinning off to join another group. We were soon moving freely throughout the space, feeling something like interlocking strains of bacteria, or as one participant described it, “like animals in a chase, ducking through the jungle.”

Throughout the workshop, we added facial expressions and vocalizations to our dance that would have had my tap teacher in a fit. By the end, I felt silly for worrying about the “all eyes on me” effect. Boán emphasized listening to the group rather than inserting out own will into our improvised movements, and in this way what could have been individual and chaotic transformed into a cohesive dance that someone watching from the sideline said almost put her into a trance. That’s where the ajiaco that Boán compared our dancing to came in–somehow all of our flavors blended together to make one remarkable, albeit sweaty, stew. Yum.

–Ellen Freeman

Photos by Sudi Green, ajiaco image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

When Jaamil Olawale Kosoko was a kid growing up in Detroit, he broke into the ice cream truck that his father, a Nigerian immigrant, drove for a living, and gave out free frozen treats to anyone who wanted them. “I didn’t have any friends,” he says. “I thought people would want to be my friend if I gave them free ice cream!”

Memories like this one, at times painful but always tinted with Kosoko’s sense of humor, form the inspiration for the 28-year-old choreographer’s dances like Or Maybe My Mother was an American Chameleon? A preview of this work-in-progress will be performed this Thursday, June 10th at 8pm for Second Thursday at the Live Arts Studio. The finished piece will be 1/8 of the Festival’s 8 (eight choreographers / eight new works).

Though the piece’s title is a reflection on the “ghost” of his schizophrenic mother, Kosoko is something of a chameleon himself. In addition to choreographing with his company KOSOKO PEFORMANCE GROUP since 2006, he is also a comedian, performance artist, arts manager, experimental vocalist, and sometimes drag bird (you may be familiar with his alter-ego, J-Luv, who co-hosted the 2009 Rocky Awards). “In one piece I’ll have drag, then stand-up comedy, then pure dance and then a soap opera scene. I like that puzzle of ‘How do you make that make sense?’” he says of the interdisciplinary nature of his work. That element is less intentional, he notes, than simply a product of his multi-faceted background.

Kosoko’s childhood was split between Detroit, where he was born and raised, and his mother’s native Natchez, Mississippi, where he moved by himself when he was 11 to take care of his ailing grandmother. Back then, his ability to move seamlessly between worlds had yet to be honed. “The nature of society in the South is different, and my mother’s reputation had preceded her. To be an afro-centric, neo-soul, alternative, schizophrenic who had moved North . . . the whole town knew this crazy black woman.” Through the teasing at school and caring for his grandma at home, Kosoko kept a journal of poetry–a journal he also kept private.

Find out whether anyone ever read those poems by clicking more.
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The most common words uttered in a second grade classroom are probably “Sit down.” Or maybe “Sit still.” And it’s difficult enough to make that happen. But what about getting a kid to stand up–to move, or to dance?

That’s the challenge Shavon Norris tackles every day. Shavon, a local choreographer who will present a new dance in 8 (eight choreographers / eight new works) this September, spends her days teaching dance and movement at Independence Charter School in Center City. Her students range in age from kindergarten to fifth grade.

On a recent afternoon, as a second grade class files into the brightly colored room and sits in a line against the back wall, Shavon dims the lights and gets the incense burning. The school’s globally-focused curriculum gives each grade level an in-depth look into two world cultures. Second grade means Japan and India, so this class has been learning the basics of yoga.

But not all of the 21 seven- to eight-year-olds are feeling the Zen quite yet. One student scurries to pull his retainer out of his pocket and put it safely on the side of the room. One needs a tissue. And someone–who could it be?–has tossed half a crayon out onto the empty floor. Shavon is not amused, and scolds the suspect. But then she gets a confession from a different student. “Thank you very much for being honest,” she says.

There’s a lot to do today. Tomorrow is the school’s International Festival–where each class will perform what they’ve learned in dance and movement class for family and friends–and the nerves are setting in. So before they start their downward dogs, a little pep talk is in order. “Tomorrow you only get one chance to dazzle the audience,” Shavon tells them. “So today, dazzle me!”

As she calls each student’s name, they get up from the wall and take a spot on the floor. They sit cross-legged, with hands atop knees. Some close their eyes. “Inhale, exhale,” she says. “Inhale, exhale.” And just like that, we have 21 miniature yogis.

Shavon leads the class through a series of moves like the Cobra, the Warrior Stance, and the Triangle Pose. She catches wandering eyes and tells them to focus. She walks around the room, adjusting a leg here, tilting a head there. She is firm in her corrections, and a student knows if Shavon doesn’t like what she sees. But Teacher Shavon, as she is called in the classroom, is also effusive in her praise. “Beautiful.” “Absolutely amazing.” “You are blowing my mind right now.” As the students stretch into the Plank pose, she looks over with a huge smile and whispers, “My babies are beasts. Beasts!”

What will Shavon’s beasts do next? Click more for more.
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But on Monday, June 7, you crazy 18-to-25-year-olds should swing on by the Live Arts Brewery for a FREE dance workshop with Marianela Boan, whose new dance Decadere premieres at the 2010 Live Arts Festival.

If you want in, email molly[at]livearts-fringe[dot]org to RSVP, and for even more details other than these: FREE, Monday, June 7, 3:30 pm, Live Arts Studio, 919 N. 5th St., Northern Liberties).

Not sure? Get to know Marianela below, through her hands and feet:

The Inquirer‘s Merilyn Jackson has it covered: “To an excerpt of long-time collaborator Philip Glass’ music, she pranced forward like a fox, staring at the floor as if it were prey and pushing the heavy air before her aside, redefining the space.”

In September, the Live Arts Festival will bring Childs’s dance Dance to Philadelphia for the first time. A unique collaboration between Childs, conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (who created the film behind and with which the dancers perform), and Philip Glass, who composed the score, Dance is a crisp and pure study of movement.

Interest in Child’s dances and those from related collectives Judson Dance Theatre and Grand Union has surged recently, as detailed by Joan Acocella in this week’s New Yorker (subscription required). Acocella reviewed Dance for the magazine in October as well. After the jump, Acocella opines on why the new production of Dance is among the best of this movement’s revival.

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