Save NYSSSA!
The National Museum of Dance in Saratoga Springs, where NYSSSA Dance and NYSSSA Ballet students take class each summer.
I know times are rough and budgets are tight. But I was shocked when I received an e-mail notice informing me that the budget for the New York State Summer School of the Arts (NYSSSA) was about to be slashed by 50%.
NYSSSA has not one but two incredible programs for teenage dancers. The NYSSSA School of Dance is geared towards modern dancers, and I’m proud to have spent several summers there working and teaching alongside an amazing faculty (ranging from the program’s director, Carolyn Adams, to such well known figures as Robert Battle, Jessica Lang, Kanji Segawa, Danny Grossman, Lorry May, Carla Maxwell - and many more). Formerly under the direction of Damian Woetzel and now led by New York City Ballet principal dancer Jenifer Ringer, the NYSSSA School of Ballet is an equally stellar program.
Now both of these schools are in danger of being cut, along with programs in orchestra, choral studies, jazz, visual arts, media arts, and theatre.
If any of you Wingers or readers are alumni of NYSSSA - or even if you are simply New York State residents - please speak out against the slashing of arts education budgets and help save this program!
This advocacy alert has information about how to contact your state representatives. There are also several Facebook groups for people who want to save NYSSSA, and some of them are sending updates about advocacy efforts. Finally, there is a new blog and petition online.
To get a better sense of NYSSSA Dance, you can read my Winger post from last summer. Here are a couple snapshots from last summer’s program:
NYSSSA Dance students clapping after class.
Teaching NYSSSA Dance alumni at this year’s reunion.
International Exposure: Exposing Dance in Israel to the World
Photo: The Suzanne Dellal Center in Tel Aviv, which will host the International Exposure Festival next week.
January means it’s time for another convening of APAP (Association of Performing Arts Presenters), with presenters converging on New York City, seeing scores of performances, and mingling with artists.
Here in Israel, there’s a similar festival: International Exposure. From January 20-25, presenters from around the globe will convene in Tel Aviv at the Suzanne Dellal Center. They will view dance created in Israel, connect with choreographers, and perhaps lay the groundwork for bringing Israeli work abroad. This year’s festival is packed with 20 concerts - many of them mixed bills - as well as several receptions, a lecture by dance scholar Gaby Aldor, and a tour of Jerusalem.
Last year I went to a few International Exposure performances, but this year I’ll be attending the entire festival and writing about it. Hopefully I’ll post a recap here on The Winger, and I’ll be putting up at least one post per day on Dance In Israel, so stay tuned!
Time to rest up before the dance overload . . .
Dance Bloggers Community Site
A screen shot of the Dance Bloggers website.
Love what you read and see here on The Winger and curious about what else exists in the dance blogosphere? I felt that way after I started blogging last year. As I started finding more blogs about dance, I wanted an easy way to follow them, discover new dance blogs, and connect with other dance bloggers. I brought these issues to my partner Tal, and out of our conversations, a new site was born: www.DanceBloggers.com
Dance Bloggers is an aggregator for dance blogs, meaning it collects teasers of posts from participating dance blogs (including The Winger, my blog Dance In Israel, and fellow Winger Taylor Gordon’s blog Off Center). If you click on an excerpt, it will redirect you to the original blog so that you can read the whole post, leave comments, and explore the rest of that blog’s content. Right now the site has over 47 participating blogs, and it’s still growing!
The screen shot above highlights a few ways to make the most out of Dance Bloggers:
-You can subscribe to receive a daily e-mail with teasers from participating blogs’ posts.
-You can become a friend of Dance Bloggers, “friend” other people, and write on the wall - just like on Facebook.
-If you have a dance blog of your own, you can also add it to the site’s directory.
Also, we just added a Google Custom Search so that you can search all of the participating blogs for specific content. Want to see who else is writing about that performance, company, or choreographer? It’s now all at your fingertips. Enjoy!
Misnomer Dance Theater: “Being Together” Video Online
Misnomer Dance Theater in Chris Elam’s Being Together.
If you missed the live feed of Misnomer Dance Theater’s performance last week (or if, like me, you live halfway around the world from New York and had to go back to bed partway through the concert!), you’re in luck: the video is online. Take advantage of your vacation time and enjoy Chris Elam’s choreography at http://www.misnomer.org/live/archive.
Happy holidays, and happy viewing . . .
Misnomer Dance Theater: Chris Elam’s “Being Together” (Live Performance Feed)
And now for an exciting (and historic) treat: the live performance feed of Misnomer Dance Theater in Chris Elam’s Being Together, on Sunday December 14th at 8:00 p.m. EST. This full-evening event contains 3 pieces: “Too Late Tulip” (18 minutes), “Rock.Paper.Flock” (25 minutes), and “Zipper” (28 minutes). You’ll have a 15 minute intermission between the 2nd and 3rd dances, and throughout the evening, you can chat with other people watching online by typing in the text box below the screen.
Care for a program? Open up another browser window to view the full credits for Being Together at http://www.misnomer.org/being-together.
This performance was made possible, in part, by The Joyce Theater Foundation, which owns and operates Joyce SoHo. Visit the Joyce online at www.joyce.org.
Here we go, folks - sit back, relax, and enjoy the show . . .
Tune in Sunday Night: Misnomer Dance Theater’s Live Performance on The Winger
Misnomer Dance Theater in Chris Elam’s Being Together; photo by ShaLeigh Comerford
What are you doing this Sunday night (December 14) at 8 p.m.? Maybe you’ll be in the audience at the Joyce SoHo for Misnomer Dance Theater’s performance of Chris Elam’s Being Together. Or maybe you want to be in the audience, but distance or other factors out of your control are keeping you away. If you can’t make it to the theater in person, fret not: Misnomer is offering a live feed of the Sunday evening concert, and we’ll embed it for you here on The Winger. Reserve a seat by your computer and open your internet browser to The Winger on Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time to see the performance and join the live chat with other people viewing online.
Here’s a preview of what you’ll see:
(Video: Preview of Misnomer Dance Theater in Chris Elam’s Being Together)
Introducing Dance In Israel: A New Resource for Concert Dance in Israel
Me dancing in Israel - improvising at Beit She’an’s amphitheater last year
I know it’s been a while since I have written, but it’s been a transitional phase for me. Bitten by the dance bug here in Israel, I officially made aliyah (moved to Israel) in late September, and much of my time has been spent unpacking, taking care of paperwork, reconnecting with Israeli friends and colleagues, and starting intensive Hebrew classes. The vocabulary I picked up last year was primarily connected to dancing, eating, and traveling, so I have a lot to learn!
When I’m not studying, I’ve been pouring my time into Dance In Israel, a new blog and a comprehensive English-language resource for the Israeli concert dance scene. Besides assembling much of my writing and podcast episodes in one place, Dance In Israel has links to the websites of Israeli companies and choreographers. It also has an events page, featuring calendars of performances and classes both in and outside of Israel (and if you’re in the U.S., you’re in luck - Batsheva will be touring the states from the end of January to the beginning of March). If what I’ve written so far on The Winger about the contemporary dance scene in Israel has intrigued you, I invite you to browse Dance In Israel at www.danceinisrael.com as well!
Dancing Researchers of Another Sort
Graduate student winner of the AAAS Science Dance Contest: Sue Lynn Lau, “The role of vitamin D in beta cell function”
Looks like I’m not the only dancing researcher out there. The 2009 AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Science Dance Contest called for science researchers to submit videos of interpretive dances on their work, and yesterday, winners were announced in the graduate student, postdoctoral, faculty, and popular choice categories.
Postdoc winner: Miriam Sach, “Cerebral activation patterns induced by inflection of regular and irregular verbs with positron emission tomography. A comparison between single subject and group analysis”
Professor winner: Vince LiCata, “Resolving Pathways of Functional Coupling in Human Hemoglobin Using Quantitative Low Temperature Isoelectric Focusing of Asymmetric Mutant Hybrids”
Popular Choice winner: Markita Landry, “Single Molecule Measurements of Protelomerase TelK-DNA Complexes”
These researchers’ evident choreographic talent will be nurtured as they work with four Chicago-based choreographers, who will create short dances based on the scientists’ papers. The final products will be performed together under the title This is Science at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Chicago in February. Pretty cool!
Check out the contest announcement for many more videos and Science Magazine’s write-up of this contest for more information.
More on Movement Notation: Reconstructing Dances from Labanotation
Inside Look: Folksay/Episode Three: Labanotation from CityDance Ensemble on Vimeo.
Greg Halloran deciphers the Labanotation score for Sophie Maslow’s Folksay, which he reconstructed for CityDance; video by Ludovic Jolivet
I recently wrote a Winger post about Eshkol-Wachman Movement Notation, since I did an interview with EWMN expert Michal Shoshani for Israel Seen. Part of my interest in learning about EWMN stemmed from my own background in Labanotation, which is commonly used in the U.S. and which I studied in graduate school at Ohio State. In case you too are curious about Labanotation, here’s a tidbit for you!
In the video above, Greg Halloran discusses some basics of Labanotation, using the score of Sophie Maslow’s Folksay (1942) to illustrate his points. Always wanted to see what Labanotation looks like? There are some great close-ups of the score that show the intricacy of the notation, and Greg explains the movements that correspond to the symbols.
The goal of movement notation is not only to record a dance but to allow it to live again through reconstructions, and I’m embedding another video which covers this issue. In the clips below, Greg talks about the process of staging Folksay from score for CityDance Ensemble, a modern dance company based in Washington, D.C. and directed by Paul Gordon Emerson. Folksay is near and dear to my heart because I wrote about it and Sophie Maslow’s other dances in my undergraduate thesis, and CityDance has been on my radar for several years since the group performs not only new work but reconstructions of older repertory. Their production of Folksay will be at the Kennedy Center this Saturday night, and I wish I could see it!
Interview for CityDance Ensemble from Ludovic Jolivet on Vimeo.
Greg Halloran reflects on reconstructing Folksay; video by Ludovic Jolivet.
Watching this video, I started thinking about all of the ways I have learned repertory in rehearsals: directly from the choreographer, from someone who previously performed the piece, from video, from someone reconstructing the dance from Labanotation score (and since I know Labanotation, from the score itself). I began to wonder if other Wingers - contributors and readers alike - have ever participated in a reconstruction from score. Have you? If so, how did that experience compare to learning repertory in other ways?
Schlepping my dance library
I’m back on a plane again tomorrow, and part of my carefully acquired dance library is coming with me. Books, DVDs, videos, scores, notebooks, programs . . . oh my! This photograph is really only a part of the full picture. Deciding what to take now and what to ship or pick up on later visits was not easy. One day my dream of a book-lined room in Tel Aviv will come true . . .
