Am installation demonstration at the Dance/NYC Symposium.

It’s super exciting to see projects like this in development. Imagine what this could do for the performing arts!

are being shared at the Dance/NYC Mid-Season Symposium.

Some super cool ideas and developments are taking place. Très cool!

I realize I tend to put up posts after events which can make it seem like all we do is get ready to perform or compete. This couldn’t be further from the truth! I have some of the hardest working students around who spend the majority of their free time in class. I have a nice group of high achievers at the STUDIO, many of them excel in much more than dance. All of them aspire to be the best they can be and I am truly lucky to be surrounded by young people who have such high hopes and bright futures. Those hopes weigh heavy on me as a teacher sometimes-it can be a great responsibility. When you run a small school you can run a danger of stagnating, dancers can at times get a false sense of how good they are, they can forget there is a whole world out there besides the 4 walls of our little studio! I make my best efforts to get them out there and see themselves in a different light. I love bringing in great teachers too. Last night we had the pleasure of hosting Valery Lantratov, he is the Artistic Director of the Russian National Ballet Foundation. He is from Moscow and had a career with the Moscow Stanislavski Ballet and was also named the “People’s Artist of Russia” in 1997 and spent some time as a guest teacher at Boston Ballet. He was an incredibly warm teacher, who stressed strong technique alongside expression.
It was a very rewarding class for my students.

Mr. Lantratov saying "hello" to his hand

Isabel, Mimi and Alston at the barre

Katie and Katrina

Happy dancers and teachers!

Photo by: Bennyroyce Royon, Dancer: Erik Wagner

Hello Wingers,

Just wanted to share with you something I have been working on for the past month. I am producing a show called “Chronos Project” which is a shared evening of choreographic works between me, Nilas Martins, Monique Meunier, and Brian Gibbs. There are THREE evening performances (7:30pm) in April (22, 23, 24) at the intimate Speyer Hall at University Settlement on the Lower East Side (184 Eldridge Street).

The project will serve the creative needs of the Lower East Side community (Manhattan) by providing a high caliber contemporary dance performances, offer a job & performance opportunity to a group of talented and wonderful freelance dance artists, and support the creative needs of four emerging choreographers to cultivate their artistic voices.

I will post more information as time comes along. But please do keep in touch on Twitter, Facebook, my YouTube page! You can search me on all of these networks by typing “Bennyroyce Royon.” Also, please go to my website: www.bennyroyce.com.

Watch this one minute teaser video: Chronos Project Teaser Video

Enjoy!

“Is dance democratic?”  A question raised near the end of the Guggenheim’s Works and Process program on Sunday night, The Art of Teaching: Participation and Perception.  I am so grateful to Tony’s previous post for presenting the material so clearly and expanding on some of the inherent problems of the specificity of ballet and each line of questioning that was raised.  I too, found the lecture highly stimulating.

Damian Woetzel, former NYCB star and recent appointee to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, brought up and answered the above question by maintaining that dance can be democratic in enjoyment and appreciation; it being an obvious fact that there is a technical gulf that often puts professional dance, and all highly technical art forms, on an unattainable pedestal, and therefore can restrict participation in the most literal sense.    Michael Sandel, his co-conspirator onstage and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard, had a different answer.  He allowed that we need not be queasy about whether dance as an art form is inherently democratic because it has (or hopefully has) resonance.  And resonance, can be a two way street for performers and audience members; much like his question and answer discussion on justice which he led earlier in the evening about disparity of wealth and compensation strived to be.  Much like the relationship between teacher and student in the classroom.  (Now we have come full circle to our title.)

Why is the idea of resonance important to me?  Why does it matter if dance or art is democratic in and of itself or just fosters democracy?  How does that relate to issues of justice and equality, whether in matters of money compensation or status in our world?

There are so many answers, or maybe just more questions, but I took away this circular reasoning: in order to maintain the ideals of equality and freedoms of speech and therefore, art, that our democracy is seeking to provide and as citizens we claim to want, we have to make sure we maintain the very institution that provides it.  And in order to try to maintain any sort of democracy, utopian or our current grasping-at-straws version, the participation of the whole community is really necessary.  And artists of all disciplines, dancing and teaching artists included, can have an impact by creating a shared experience via their art for a community of people to participate in, either literally or by enjoyment and appreciation.  Participating begets participating.  I can channel this idea even more easily by thinking of the inverse:  that tyrannies are allowed to exist when people lack community and shared experiences, resulting in feelings of fear and isolation that further perpetuate that negative cycle.  Even seeing or experiencing art that is depressing or upsetting, is somehow still a beacon of light; if only to remind you that you are not alone, that you are surrounded by community and someone out there understands moments of darkness too.

Sandel also brought up the idea that our sense of justice in regards to compensation is just a reflection of our values as a community (what we are willing to pay for and how much) and so if we truly wanted to fight for equality in our society, it would theoretically just be a matter of righting who and what we value.  Just!  I know it sounds overly simplistic.  But it was a really inspiring moment for me because I realized that the righting of values and therefore our reflection of those values in our society, begins in the classroom, in museums, in studios, in concert halls and opera houses.  Ultimately, it is just about coming together to have a shared experience of other and each other.

As our nation, and in particular New York City, struggles with the ever widening gap between rich and poor, I found this lecture to be timely and profound.  Ultimately art and teaching and the art of teaching is about learning and experience and hopefully, reciprocation between teacher and student, artist and audience.  And the resonance that extends beyond that participation and/or perception is what brings us to the shared experience and sense of community; two of the greatest examples of the evening being the opening of the lecture with the audience joining together to do the opening phrase of Serenade and the closing of the lecture with the finale of Dances At a Gathering.  I got chills, even as I was guest tweeting it love for the Guggenheim and for my own twitter feed.

Now more than ever, I want to go to bed at night thinking my community is not a corporation, but rather a collection of individuals (who are also not corporations!) coming together every now and then to participate in the intellectual and creative life that a healthy democracy and our treasured freedoms require.

{Pictured:  Tiler Peck, NYCB dancer, Damian Woetzel and Michael Sandel.  Photos by Erin Baiano.  Courtesy of Guggenheim, Museum Works and Process.)

This Sunday I went to a lecture demonstration given at the Guggenheim as part of their Works & Process series.  The Art of Teaching: Participation & Perception consisted of a talk by Damien Woetzel, principal in New York City Ballet 89-08, and Proffesor of Government and Rhodes scholar, Michael Sandel.

I found the whole affair highly problematic.  This is a good thing.  It means I was engaged and the performance was an authentic experiment in process.  The piano accompaniment by Cameron Grant and the dancing by Tiler Peck, Joaquin De Luz and Robert Fairchild were not only beautiful but also incredibly intimate in the small Peter B. Lewis Theater.

The presentation started with Damien who opened with the question to the audience.  What is performance?  He spoke about a “ladder of engagement” for the viewer.  He then introduced Tiler Peck who danced the opening of Balanchine’s famed Serenade.  Afterwards Damien “taught” the opening choreography to the audience who then “danced” it with music.  There was not enough room for the audience to do the arms so the exercise, for me, was a bit forced and uncomfortable but I am always one for traumatizing audiences.  I did appreciate the attempted accention of the “ladder of engagement.”  My mind also grumbled when Damien described turning the feet out into first position as “becoming a dancer.”  Pardon my French but ballet is not the only dance on the block.

Certainly this is a separate issue, though the performances by Tiler Peck and Joaquin De Luz (of various openings from Robbins ballets) made a good case for ballet being “the dance.”  Maybe first position is the best way to become a dancer.  If that’s how these two did then they have a strong arguement.  While the dancing was all beautiful I found the lines of thought offered by Damien to be difficult to incorporate into what I was seeing in the bodies.  Granted, he teaches the great ballets and I do not so I would expect our interests to be quite different.  Perhaps I wanted to watch the dancing without intellectualizing it.  Very unlike me.

After a short video introducing Michael Sandel, he emerged to give his talk.  It was good in that it again, like Damien’s call for our participation,  transgressed the comfort zone of the audience.  It too made me rather agitated.  In an attempt to probe our ideas about “justice and equality” Sandel went straight to the hot button issue.  What do you think about record bonuses immediately following the largest transfer of debt from private to public the world has ever seen?  (Not his words exactly.)  What do we think about 50% tax on bonuses for investment bankers?

Everyone certainly had an opinion.  Some thought the tax should be more, others like Stuart Cohen thought society might collapse if investment banking “talent” be forced to take up their proffesion in another field.  I wonder?  As a physicist I know Wall St drains many of our PhD’s to work on options pricing and algorithmic trading schemes over the development of new physics and technology.  A burping gentleman behind me kept muttering, “it’s the market stupid, it’s not justice, it just is.”  A woman in back framed it as a public relations issue and thought it dangerous, with regards to civil unrest, if people percieved the wealth inequity to be as high as it is.  Finally a woman in front explained that following the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand the fully unregulated free market, and the distribution of wealth which it generated, was the just one by definition.  Rand, of course, was the fountainhead of much neoliberal market philosophy that shaped the aggresive deregulation schemes during Greenspan’s reign at the federal reserve.

Clearly I have an opinion too.

Sandel then showed the wealth disparities between, the average public school teacher and David Letterman, and Chief Justice Roberts and Judge Judy.  After showing each income disparity he’d ask, “is this just?”  In the end he tried to draw a connection between the wealth disparities between celebrities and public servants and the gap between regular working shmoes and the financial oligopoly.  The big error I see in his logic is that though David Letterman maybe overpaid while public school teachers are underpaid, David Letterman is not hurting anybody.  David Letterman does not get rich by selling to pension funds financial products that are set to self destruct and then betting BIG that they explode.  Big invesment banks enrich themselves this way.  This is vampirism.  David Letterman, on the other hand, gets our attention because he is funny.  He then sells that attention.  Letterman has no victims.

In the end Sandel and Woetzel sat down together and discussed the similarities and differences in their seperate discursive modes.  It was Sandel’s contention that the classroom, or public speaking forum, was much better suited for creating meaningful participation by the audience.  Though I don’t agree I can understand his thinking and that is enough for me.  Congratulations to the Guggenheim for presenting this kind of work.  I would never have thought I would be in the midst of New York’s most well bred, read and cultured discussing banking in a spirited and physical context.  Bravo to that.  Also cheers to Damien Woetzel who continues to put dance where it does not belong.  Which is exactly where I believe it belongs.

It’s horrible to hear of the tragedy in Haiti and how the devastation continues for the people who suffered from the earthquake recently - but it’s even more of a shock to know someone closer to home, in our own tight NYC dance community, who was hit personally by the aftermath.

The Haitian dance teacher at The Ailey Extension Program, Peniel Guerrier, apparently lost family members in the devastation and knows others in trouble there. Fortunately Ailey has donated time and space to offer a big benefit performance evening, with all ticket proceeds going directly to those in need in Haiti.

Though I’ve never taken Peniel’s class, I always feel a personal loss when I hear of sad news in the dance community (like the recent death of my teacher’s great ballet teacher, Dick Andros). The dance world is so small and I’ve somehow developed that strong empathy for those who’ve lost - so I am very glad to know I can do something myself to help this time.

I’ll be performing in the 9:30pm benefit performance this Saturday night (Jan. 23), and I’m really looking forward to being part of the cause. I’ll be dancing one of my favorite variations - Kitri’s Act 3 Variation from Don Quixote - coached by my amazing teacher, Kat Wildish.

If you’re in the city and want to give, I highly recommend coming to either the 7pm or my 9:30pm performance that night. A whole slew of talent is performing. Cash donations are also being accepted at the Ailey Extension front desk at their studios. Purchase tickets (and see more info) here.

I realize I haven’t posted in quite a while and I apologize that my last post inspired a firestorm of comments!
It seems like I have been working non-stop for the past few months and have had little time for much else.
We just got back from YAGP, but it’s back in to the studio today.
This year I didn’t ask any of my students to go, they all asked me. I feel it is a good experience for them and important for them to step outside of their comfort zone. It is one thing to be a big fish in a small pond and another to have the courage to put yourself out there and ask to be judged by some of the most distinguished professionals in the field.
The dancers that went all had their own inner demons to contend with, they rose to the occasion and gave some of the best performances of their lives so far. This in itself is amazing. I admire each one of them for the work they put in and for the personal results that they got.
When asked by Shelley King (regional director of YAGP) if my students were happy, I was honest and told that there was both joy and disappointment. She told me that it was me-or my job back in the studio to continue to guide them to greater heights.
I will definately do my best.