Dance Magazine Awards 2014: Meet the Winners

Winners
2014 Dance Magazine Awards 

Misty Copeland (American Ballet Theater)
presented by
Raven Wilkinson

Larissa Saveliev (Youth America Grand Prix)
presented by
Susan Jaffe

Luigi (jazz master)
presented by
Liza Minnelli

Brenda Bufalino and Tony Waag (American Tap Dance Foundation)
presented by
Constance Valis Hill

Wayne McGregor (independent choreographer)
presented by
Jedediah Wheeler

***

Last evening at The Ailey Citigroup Theater, as this year's Dance Magazine Awards were handed out, speaker after speaker voiced concerns and hopes for the future of the great art of dance. From those stalwart tap masters and advocates Brenda Bufalino and Tony Waag to ballerina Raven Wilkinson who, in the 1950s, broke the color line with a contract for full-time employment at Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, nearly everyone spoke of how far dance had come and the role of Dance Magazine as its supporter. Before presenting an award to choreographer Wayne McGregor, Jedediah Wheeler, Executive Director for Arts and Cultural Programming at Montclair State University, made brief note of the significance of dance writers and the media in general in connecting artists to audiences. 

"I don't want to bring the energy down, but I feel we have a bit of a crisis going on," Wheeler began while avoiding putting a name on that crisis. A little later, he lauded Dance Magazine for being "indispensable to our community." 

I wondered how a publication that had eliminated dance reviews could be considered "indispensable" to this field. Also, in light of the recent blowup around The New Republic, I wondered how any media outlet today could justify what, from the looks of the staff members proudly rising to identify themselves, is an all-white editorial team. Moreover, from my vantage point, it was impossible to miss one stark difference between the Dance Magazine ceremony and the Bessies, held now at The Apollo Theater. At the Bessie Awards, the audience's diversity in race, age and dance genre--especially in the Bessies' recent comeback years under Lucy Sexton--is thrilling and heartening. That, my friends, is the future of dance, the future of its makers, its movers, its shakers, its fans.

Dance Magazine's evening featured five presentations interspersed with performances, including La Mort d'Ophélie, a commissioned duet by American Ballet Theater's Marcelo Gomes for Sarah Lane with Sterling Baca as her inexpressive but efficient handler; an excerpt from American Tap Dance Orchestra's All Blues/Tacit/Latin that swiftly whipped up intricate and frisky charm when Bufalino and Waag got out of the way and left wonderful Felipe Galganni and Lynn Schwab to their own devices; a duet from McGregor's Chroma performed by Ailey dancers Akua Noni Parker and Jeroboam Bozeman. Copeland selected Gomes's Toccare (2012) to dance with the excellent Alexandre Hammoudi, and we could not have wished for a more alive and bracing performance from this pair. When Wilkinson later declared that the ballerina, with her mission to promote racial diversity in the ballet world, was one reason "ballet will not become dry on a musty vine," one could see that, yes, her point had much to do with race but not everything to do with race.

Overall, the presenters tended to ramble. In the future, can everyone take a tip from Liza with-a-z Minnelli, presenting via audio to the also-absent Luigi, and just declare their respect and affection in 100 words or less? Here's Liza, quickly wrapping up her already brief remarks to Luigi: "I think of you, I get up and do the damn exercises, and I'm fine. I think of you and love you more than anybody knows!"

I get up and do the damn exercises, and I'm fine. Seriously, what more do you need? That's even Twitter-ready. But, honestly, I could listen all day to Susan Jaffe talk about her friend Larissa Saveliev ("the quintessential entrepreneur CEO of the ballet world"), and Saveliev talk about herself and her path towards creating the Youth America Grand Prix ballet competition. Both have a great sense of self and humor, and their stories are delightfully entertaining and inspiring ones.

***

2014 Dance Magazine Award Committee Members

Joseph Carman (author, Round About the Ballet)

Amy Cogan (Senior VP, Publisher, DanceMedia)

Karen Hildebrand (VP, Editorial, DanceMedia)

Susan Jaffe (Dean of Dance, University of North Carolina School of the Arts)

Wendy Perron (Editor at Large, Dance Magazine; author, Through the Eyes of a Dancer)

Charles Reinhart (Director Emeritus, American Dance Festival)

Learn more about the 2014 Dance Magazine Award winners here.

Alla Sizova, 75

Alla Sizova, Star Kirov Ballerina, Dies at 75
by Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times, December 8, 2014

Laveen Naidu resigning Dance Theater of Harlem directorship

Dance Theater of Harlem’s Executive Director to Step Down

by Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, December 8, 2014

Wynn Chamberlain, 87

Wynn Chamberlain, an Artist in Paint, on Screen and in Novels, Dies at 87
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, December 6, 2014

Galapagos Arts Space to relocate to Detroit

Born in Brooklyn, Now Making a Motown Move
Galapagos Art Space Will Make Detroit Its Home
by Colin Moynihan, The New York Times, December 7, 2014

New book pays tribute to feminist author Merlin Stone

Cover of Merlin Stone's When God Was A Woman (1976),
a formative work of the Women's Spirituality movement

Merlin Stone Remembered: Her Life and Works
by David B. Axelrod, Carol F. Thomas, Lenny Schneir and Merlin Stone
(Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd., 2014; 384 pages)
ISBN: 9780738740911

reviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody
also posted to hummingwitch

Merlin Stone's research into ancient Goddess civilizations and spiritual beliefs (as author of When God Was A Woman and Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood) and her prodigious creativity on the feminist scene of the 1970s and '80s, touched the lives of many women and our male allies. When I was a producer and host at WBAI, New York's Pacifica radio station, I interviewed Stone (World Watch: Goddess at Dawn, May 1988) and, in 1990, had the honor of speaking on a panel with her, Spiderwoman Theater's Gloria Miguel and other feminists working in non-mainstream spiritual traditions and the arts. Later, Stone invited me to assist with a new audio project. We began to meet, but our work was interrupted and never completed. In declining health, she passed in the winter of 2011.

We're now at a time when young women often distance themselves from the feminist label; when the public discourse, even among feminist activists, relegates spirituality to oblivion; and when the religious dictates of patriarchy demonstrate their disastrous effects on a civic and global level. I was excited to learn that Llewellyn Worldwide planned to bring out a book on Merlin Stone's life and contributions. Surely, Stone would speak to our condition once again, offering alternative perspectives and motivation.

Merlin Stone Remembered--a rough patchwork assembled by admiring colleagues and family members--is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the book I'd hoped to read. Ideally, that book might be researched and written by an independent scholar, not a committee intent on unnecessarily and redundantly pleading The Case for Merlin Stone's Greatness. It would offer both a deep, detailed, coherent, reasonably objective portrait of this unusual and unusually determined woman, born Marilyn Claire Jacobson in Brooklyn in 1931. It might give us an engaging account of her many travels throughout the Mediterranean and Near East, to the extent that adequate documentation exists, and a professional assessment of her life's work. At least the introduction by noted ecofeminist Dr. Gloria F. Orenstein takes pains to put Stone in the context of other pioneering, if often controversial, authors such as Helen Diner, Monica Sjoo, and Marija Gimbutas.

The book's collaborators take a preemptive tack, defending their inclusion of a memoir by Stone's companion, Leonard ("Lenny") Schneir. A professional poker player and dealer in gambling memorabilia, Schneir lived with Stone for decades, seeing her through her final illness and death. By all accounts, the relationship was a happy one and, for Schneir, instructive and transforming. Apparently, though, the book team ran into some unidentified women's objections to the idea of Schneir adding his story to Merlin Stone Remembered.

I would never take issue with Schneir having a say here merely because he is male. But I suspect that you, like me, might find yourself hurrying through the lengthy, at times self-indulgent narrative about his journey before and with Stone--and, definitely, you will want to move past the poems. Greater care should have been taken with the overall structure and balance of this book.

Schneir's participation is not the book's only flaw, merely one out of many. Throwing together excerpts from Stone's interviews, bits of her published and (perhaps, justifiably) unpublished work, and repetitive essays like David B. Axelrod's "reflection on the poetic genius of Merlin Stone" and another by Schneir with Axelrod, entitled "The Importance of Merlin Stone" argues that this is a case of opportunities not only missed but willfully refused.

Instead of illuminating substance, we get filler: Stone's honorary doctorate certificate from The California Institute of Integral Studies, her birth certificate, pages of photos not selected to add anything to our understanding of the woman. One section reproduces numerous examples of fan mail from her readers, but I doubt that, even in the Internet Age, this author needs Yelp-style testimonials. What follows these letters? Another essay: this time, "The Legacy of Merlin Stone."

Here's how I want to remember Stone: as the woman who, in a talk with Michael Toms, subtly noted a difference between "planetary consciousness" and "planetary conscience." As a white woman troubled by racism, an observer of psyches and societies who saw fear at the root of repression. As a writer, sometimes pedagogic in tone but broadminded in her vision of feminism and of spirituality. A writer whose informed, complex, inspiring work was everything this book is not.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody
also posted to hummingwitch

How's that Ailey troupe looking?

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
performing Ronald K. Brown's Four Corners
(photo: Paul Kolnik)

Holiday time has come again. As we ask each year, then, how's the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater looking?

Looking good! That is not news. That is pretty much what they do.

I have no news for you in this post.

And I really won't be able to tell you much about the 2014 New York City Center season, because I'm making only one dip into it, and that happened last night in the company of loyal fans of America's cherished dance ambassadors to the world.

Antonio Douthit-Boyd
in Ulysses Dove's Bad Blood
(photo: Steve Wilson)

The troupe performed Bad Blood (Ulysses Dove, 1984), Four Corners (Ronald K. Brown, 2013) and After the Rain (Christopher Wheeldon, 2005), capping the evening off with Ailey's Revelations (1960). I wouldn't call this slate a program of radical experimentation or risk on the part of Robert Battle. I'd say it maintains the status of Ailey as filled with expertly sculpted performers whose bodies are the point and the meaning behind whole stretches of movement of any kind in any season. Give Ailey audiences this beauty, this technical facility, this passionate physicality to behold, and the job is done. We go to kick back and drink in these marvelous stars and stars-in-waiting, maybe to feel a little better about the potential of the human race, and they give us their all.

This is not all I look for in an experience of dance. Far from it. But it's not nothing either. It is what it is.

Ailey dancers in Four Corners
above: Belen Pereyra
below: Kervin Douthit-Boyd

Last night's marquee item might have been the pas de deux from Christopher Wheeldon's After the Rain, danced by Linda Celeste Sims and Glenn Allen Sims. Anything coming from the world of ballet has a certain built-in sheen to it, and this is Wheeldon, after all. Safe choice. But, for me, Brown's Four Corners was the evening's knockout. The piece stirs Brown's eclectic (and perennial) movement elements and embodied spirituality to silky perfection. And look at its primary inspiration--a song by poet Carl Hancock Rux with grief for the fallen, angels seeking to bestoy healing peace and a ringing exhortation to the people:

Yours is simply this

Command and stand up

Stand

You are beautiful

And lovely

Beautiful and lovely

In this time of pain and despair, could there really be anything more in the spirit of Ailey?

an excerpt from Four Corners

The 2014 Ailey season at New York City Center continues through January 4. For schedule and ticket information, click here.