{"id":9705,"date":"2019-04-25T16:48:40","date_gmt":"2019-04-25T23:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lesliedinaberg.com\/wordpress\/?p=9705"},"modified":"2019-11-25T14:54:34","modified_gmt":"2019-11-25T22:54:34","slug":"dance-drives-dialogue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lesliedinaberg.com\/wordpress\/?p=9705","title":{"rendered":"Dance Drives Dialogue"},"content":{"rendered":"
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International colloquium in dance and performance studies addresses issues of race and racism in American classical ballet<\/span><\/strong><\/h1>\n<\/header>\n
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The beauty and artistry of ballet can belie the sometimes painful truths that exist behind the dance.<\/p>\n

\"Calvin

Calvin Royal III and Unity Phelan in George Balanchine\u2019s \u201cAgon\u201d (1957), Vail International Dance Festival 2018. Restaged by Heather Watts. Photo by Eric Baiano.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThose dances by George Balanchine<\/a> and other 20th<\/sup>-century neoclassical choreographers reveal how the idiom of classical ballet has institutionalized and subverted American racism,\u201d said Ninotchka D. Bennahum<\/a>, a professor of dance and performance studies at UC Santa Barbara.<\/p>\n

These ballets \u2014 such as the iconic,\u00a0Civil Rights-era Balanchine ballet\u00a0\u201cAgon\u201d\u00a0from 1957\u00a0\u2014 reveal the complex relationship ballet and preeminent cultural institutions share with racial consciousness in the United States before and after World War II, she added. \u201cDance artists asked to undertake these roles have the capacity, the moral\u00a0responsibility to shift our consciousness or to raise our consciousness. No work of art belongs solely to its time,\u201d Bennahum said.<\/p>\n

These topics and others will be considered when distinguished scholars and world-class performers gather Monday, April 29 in UC Santa Barbara\u2019s ballet studio for the colloquium \u201cRace, Ballet, American Dance,\u201d a day of discussion and demonstration. Co-curated by Bennahum and Stephanie Batiste<\/a>, an associate professor of English and of Black studies, the conference is the inaugural event of the International Colloquium for the Study of Dance and Performance Studies.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will pose the question, \u2018What is the value of these actual works of ballet as historical archive?\u201d<\/p>\n

Combining elements of live performance and music, discussion and filmography, the multidisciplinary colloquium \u2014 which is free and open to the public \u2014 will explore the critical role of art in capturing and commenting on American history, specifically examining how racism has been institutionalized in American classical ballet.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe history of the civil rights movement is written by ballet choreographers and modern choreographers,\u201d said Bennahum. \u201cDancing bodies play a vital role in getting audiences, in raising public awareness to issues of injustice, to issues of joy and love and sexuality, and things that are not so easy to articulate with words.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut these are not happenstance dances, these are dances that happened in very particular moments of time,\u201d she added. \u201cThe relationship between African American vernacular dance, African American choreographed ballet and Russian, British, American ballet, really became a symbol of race relations in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

Participants will enter the event through a lobby exhibition featuring an archival collection of photographs curated by Bennahum from the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library, the largest and most comprehensive archive in the world devoted to the documentation of dance.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really feel that it\u2019s very important for students that we show them dancing bodies they cannot see in Santa Barbara,\u201d Bennahum said. \u201cThe gravitational center of dance in the world is New York and I just felt we had to bring it to them, and we had to bring it in the form of performance and in the form of art exhibit, images on the walls, so they see that this is an intellectual, academic subject they can study. But it cannot happen without performance because without that the archive is missing. You have to have a sense of the geography of the stage. For these kids learning to dance, to know and feel their way through history, kinesthetic awareness is really significant.\u201d<\/p>\n

Further to that end, the colloquium\u2019s featured guests include Heather Watts<\/a>, former principal dancer of New York City Ballet and a distinguished lecturer, who will present and stage two seminal works: George Balanchine\u2019s \u201cAgon,\u201d with music by Igor Stravinsky, and Jerome Robbins\u2019 \u201cAfternoon of a Faun,\u201d with music by Claude Debussy. The pieces will be danced by Calvin Royal III<\/a> (principal dancer, American Ballet Theatre) and Unity Phelan<\/a> (soloist, New York City Ballet), accompanied by New York City Ballet Orchestra pianist Cameron Grant.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn different ways, at their premieres both Balanchine\u2019s \u201cAgon\u201d (1957) and Robbins\u2019 \u201cAfternoon of a Faun\u201d (1953) addressed issues of race,\u201d said Watts. \u201cI\u2019m looking forward to sharing and examining these works at the colloquium, focusing on their impact felt not only in the mid-century civil rights era in which they were created, but also today as they live on through new generations of dancers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also performing is Alicia Graf Mack<\/a>, chair of dance at The Juilliard School and former principal dancer with Dance Theatre of Harlem, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Alonzo King\/LINES. Her piece will be followed by a conversation with Lynn Garafola<\/a>, professor emerita of dance at Barnard College, Columbia University and \u201cpreeminent ballet scholar in the United States who, with her husband (American historian Eric Foner of Columbia University) is a really important race scholar,\u201d noted Bennahum. Garafola also will lecture on the African American Presence in Postwar American Dance.<\/p>\n

An artists\u2019 roundtable early in the day will provide insight direct from dancers themselves, while a later artist-scholar discussion will offer a multi-pronged analysis of what has taken place during the conference.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy research on Black dance often has a lot to do with analysis of form and in terms of movement and repertoire,\u201d Batiste said. \u201cDancers often think about dance in ways that are really different from how scholars think about dance. Those two approaches to how the body makes meaning together in one space show the value of what scholars bring and what dancers bring to same work of art.\u201d<\/p>\n

Batiste gave much of the credit to Bennahum for putting together the colloquium, while Bennahum extended credit to Watts, to donors John and Jody Arnhold and to Majewski. \u201cDance is very expensive,\u201d said Bennahum. \u201cClassical ballet is very expensive and they have made this possible for the university, and believed that UC Santa Barbara, above every other place in the country, was the place to create a laboratory, a think tank, about race and ballet.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re at a very tense moment in history,\u201d she concluded. \u201cArt plays a significant role in that conversation in these moments in time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Originally published in The Current<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(UCSB) on April 23, 2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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