Tim Rollins, 62

Artist Tim Rollins Has Died at 62
by Benjamin Sutton, Hyperallergic, December 27, 2017

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Dave Valentin, 64

Dave Valentin, a Grammy Award-Winning Latin Jazz Flutist, Dies at 64
by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, March 8, 2017

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Simon Dove will succeed Davidson at Dancing in the Streets

Simon Dove
(photo: Simon Dove)

Aviva Davidson, outgoing Executive and Artistic Director of Dancing in the Streets, has announced her successor--Simon Dove, former Director of the School of Dance at Arizona State University. Dove will take the helm of the South Bronx-based organization on January 1, 2016.

Davidson calls Dove "a visionary arts leader," one well-positioned to continue and build upon the relationships and collaborative projects she has established--such as the South Bronx Culture Trail with Casita Maria Center for Arts & Education--while forging new local and international collaborations.

Founded in 1984 by Elise Bernhardt and noted for site-specific and community-oriented projects, Dancing in the Streets moved its headquarters to the South Bronx in 2011.

“The organization has an impeccable history of creating compelling performance work in vibrant community settings around New York City, as well as providing important platforms for many of the city’s own Urban art forms," says Dove. "I look forward to broadening and deepening this work; developing new projects that can engage the diversity of New York’s communities, further artists’ creative practices in community contexts, and showcase the power, vitality and importance of urban cultures.”

Simon Dove is an experienced arts leader, curator and educator, and currently co-curator of Crossing the Line, the annual trans-disciplinary fall festival in New York City. He was Professor of Practice and Director of the School of Dance at Arizona State University from 2007 to 2012. Simon Dove was Artistic and Executive Director of Springdance, the international festival of new developments in dance and performance in the Netherlands from 2000 to 2007. Prior to that he ran one of the first National Dance Agencies in the U.K, the Yorkshire Dance Centre in Leeds, was the founder and Artistic Director of Vivarta – the first contemporary South Asian performance festival in the U.K. He contributed
to national dance policy development with the Arts Council of Great Britain, and programmed an innovative arts centre in London. He has also written for the Performance and South Asian press, devised and presented a series for BBC Radio 3 on Dance and Music, and extensively mentored students and professional artists from many countries in developing their creative practice.

For more information on Dancing in the Streets, click here.

Milton Cardona, 69

Milton Cardona, Keeper of New York Salsa’s Beat, Dies at 69
by Jon Pareles, The New York Times, September 26, 2014

New South Bronx group seeks performers

Join a new South Bronx community performance group led by Alejandra Duque at Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education and Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD). Weekly sessions begin on March 2, and Jonzi D will lead a special community dance theater workshop on March 5.

Bold move for Aviva Davidson's Dancing in the Streets

I have an article in the Winter 2013 issue of Seattle-based Grantmakers in the Arts Reader (GIAreader) on New York's Dancing in the Streets organization and its initiatives in the South Bronx.

Click here to read "Dancing in the Streets Busts a South Bronx Move."

The Reader is also now available as an ePub for Apple devices in the iTunes store, for Kindle on Amazon.com, and for Nook tablets on Barnesandnoble.com.

Women, spirituality, healthy relationships: a talk at BAAD

I'm happy to announce that I've been asked to give a talk at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD) on the topic of spirituality and healthy relationships, specifically for queer women and transpeople.

Sunday, February 17 (5:30-7:30pm)

Admission is free, and this informal, interactive talk will be followed by a free screening of Cheryl Dunye's film, co-written with Sarah Schulman, Mommy is Coming ("a sassy, raunchy, romantic sex comedy set in the edgy underground of Berlin where love and taboo affairs collide.")

Light refreshments will be served.

Click here to RSVP or call 718-482-5223.

BAAD
841 Baretto Street, The Bronx
(map/directions)

This road is officially opened: Paseo

This road is officially opened...

There is no road to nowhere, only to what is still here. 

-- La Bruja

Bobby Sanabria

"As this has never been done before, we have no idea what we're doing today," Joanna Haigood half-joked at the launch of Paseo, less a walking tour than a movable, danceable feast, a peripatetic block party that, for one delightful hour, would twist through the South Bronx neighborhoods of Hunts Point and Longwood. Haigood, a site-specific choreographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area, had teamed up with musical director Bobby Sanabria (multiple Grammy winner) and Dancing in the Streets executive and artistic director Aviva Davidson to create this public celebration.

La Bruja (photo by Rosalia Rivera)

With hip hop poet La Bruja's blessings, the procession stepped off from Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education on Simpson Street. Threatening clouds hung low, but spirits flew as we followed the lead of the ebullient Sanabria and his musicians, passing dancers on fire escapes and brownstone stoops. Cries of "Que vivo, Puerto Rico" went up as we passed balconies flying the island's flag.

Haigood had warned of the temptation to stop along the way: "Paseo is best enjoyed as a stroll, a promenade," she said. Indeed, it was hard not to linger with the guitarists and dancing couple in front of Nico Laundromat, or the curbside conga players, or the four doo wop singers, or the chorus in their smart white suits and skirts or even to stop to comfort a couple of unnerved cats who scampered away from our surging procession.

Yes, my lower back and feet talked to me long after I returned home, but still....

Rumbas in the park till past midnight in the canyons of da’ projects in the summer. 

Couldn’t sleep? Who cares, you didn’t want to.

--Bobby Sanabria

To read an excerpt from Bobby Sanabria's Nuyorican Memories, about his youth in the historic, still vibrant South Bronx, click here.

Charles Rice-Gonzalez talks about "Chulito"

Charles Rice-Gonzalez--known to many of us as an activist and Executive Director of BAAD!--discusses his new novel, Chulito, about a young gay Puerto Rican man living in the South Bronx, in this wonderful interview with Maria Hinojosa of NPR's Latino USA.

Tough Love (12:03)

The Foundry's magical history tour

A tour bus, owned and driven by Mary Wallace (top, mirrored),
makes its way through the South Bronx in The Foundry Theatre's
production of The Provenance of Beauty. Photos: courtesy of The
Foundry Theatre


Innovative performers try all kinds of ways to shake up and engage audiences, breaking through the fourth wall and messing with the environment in which audiences think they can safely hide and objectively judge. Some of these approaches aren't terribly fresh; others seem gimmicky; still others can backfire--but not in the case of The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, the latest production of The Foundry Theatre. Taking a tour bus filled with people on a poetic, eye-opening tour of the neighborhoods, history and contemporary social, economic and environmental issues of the South Bronx turns out to be powerfully effective and, yes, beautiful theater.

This travelogue, written by poet Claudia Rankine, created by Rankine with Foundry's founder Melanie Joseph, and directed by Joseph and Shawn Sides, runs for 90 minutes, during which the audience sits in air-conditioned comfort and separation from its object of attention--just as if it were safely tucked away in a darkened proscenium theater. But, here, the audience is on the move, in a bus, through the huge, winding geography of an unorthodox performance space that lives and breathes. The South Bronx plays itself. Bus owner/driver Mary Wallace maneuvers this unusual route; her driving is a skillful, sensitively-timed dance.

Our journey takes us out of one borough (from the curb in front of an East Harlem church) into the streets and past the landmarks of another (the Bronx neighborhoods of Hunts Point and Mott Haven), both home to predominantly poor and working-class people of color. On the day that I took the tour, the bus riders were mostly white theater-goers. Rankine's narration--voiced live by Sarah Nina Hayon and on recording by Raúl Castillo and Randy Danson--addresses the fraught relationship of gazer and gazed-at, desire for acquisition of land, the complicated nature of development and gentrification in old, storied neighborhoods, "the beauty of a place pulled out of the abandonment of another."

"What you look at will look back at you," Hayon says, as we roll towards the Willis Avenue Bridge and contemplate the moment at which it became amusing to New York's rapidly-assimilating white immigrants to shake their heads as they remembered their Latin-izing neighborhoods and quip, "The Bronx? No thonx!" I spied a sign reading, "The Bronx--All-American City," just as Hayon evoked memories of Howard Cosell's 1977 declaration, "There it is, ladies and gentlemen: the Bronx is burning."

Truly, much of what the audience sees, beyond its ironic, glass-enclosed captivity, is grim and worrisome. There's the prison barge and the gate where families enter to visit their loved ones; the Duane Reade colonizing a distinctive building that once housed a bustling dance hall; the Giuliani-bestowed green space sitting at the lip of a poisoned river, between a rock (a fertilizer plant) and a hard place (a waste water treatment plant). Even cheerful memories of La Lupe--"the woman with the devil in her body"--are compromised by the story of how this vivacious singer ended her days in poverty.

But let me assure you, there's life, and there's beauty. The bus windows subtly mirror each other. Each one creates not only a view of whatever and whoever is actually moving past your window but also a continuous, ghostly, kaleidoscopic stream of imagery from the opposite window. Well, you have to see it to believe how dazzling--and disorienting--this overlapping of actual and reflected human, vehicular and architectural imagery can be. Rankine's text sometimes hits (and hits hard) and sometimes misses (in fuzzy poetic musing) but often informs and challenges. She's at her best when she makes us think and when she conspires with the South Bronx to make us feel.

We roll along, unable to speak to the people we see outside our windows, people who rarely look toward us to make eye contact. I came to doubt that our contact would be welcomed. (A big tour bus? Filled with mostly white people?) By the time Mary Wallace momentarily pulled the bus into a somewhat spruced-up sector bearing the ominous name of SoBro, this confinement and isolation was beginning to hurt my heart. Then, to make matters worse, Hayon got off the bus and slipped away, melting into the landscape, rejoining the South Bronx in the act of being itself. I watched her go and keenly felt her absence.

We powered up and took the Third Avenue Bridge back to Manhattan.


East Harlem's Elmendorf Reformed Church.
The pickup/dropoff point for The Provenance
of Beauty. Photo: (c)2009, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

The Provenance of Beauty rolls now through late October. Get on the bus. For complete schedule information and ticketing, click here.