2022

Kyle Abraham

Lucinda Childs

Herman Cornejo

Brenda Dixon-Gottschild

Dianne McIntyre

Chairman’s Award: Jim Herbert

Harkness Promise Awards: Johnnie Cruise Mercer and Kayla Farrish

2021

Robert Battle

Andy Blankenbuehler

Dormeshia

Akram Khan

Tamara Rojo

Chairman’s Award: Works & Process

Special Citation: Dr. Wendy Ziecheck

Harkness Promise Awards: Alethea Pace and Yin Yue

2020

Carlos Acosta

Debbie Allen

Camille A. Brown

Alonzo King

Laurieann Gibson

Chairman’s Award: Darren Walker

Harkness Promise Awards: Marjani Forté-Saunders and Kyle Marshall

2019

Masazumi Chaya

Angel Corella

David Gordon and Valda Setterfield

Sara Mearns

Chairman’s Award: Linda Shelton

Harkness Promise Awards: Bobbi Jene Smith and Caleb Teicher

2018

Ronald K. Brown

Lourdes Lopez

Crystal Pite

Michael Trusnovec

Leadership Award: Nigel Redden

Harkness Promise Awards: Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie and Raja Feather Kelly

2017

Rennie Harris

Marika Molnar

Linda Celeste Sims

Diana Vishneva

2016

Carolyn Adams

Lynn Garafola

Lar Lubovitch

Tiler Peck

2015

Soledad Barrio

Marcelo Gomes

Karen Kain

David Vaughan

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

2014

Brenda Bufalino and Tony Waag

Misty Copeland

Luigi

Wayne McGregor

Larissa Saveliev

2013

Martha Clarke

Mats Ek

Philip Glass

Yuan Yuan Tan

Patricia Wilde

2012

Julie Kent

Anna Kisselgoff

Renee Robinson

Dianne Walker

2011

Dr. William Hamilton

Alexei Ratmansky

Kathleen Marshall

Yvonne Rainer

Jenifer Ringer

2010

Deborah Jowitt

Pilobolus Dance Theatre

Irina Kolpakova

Matthew Rushing

2009

Allegra Kent

Ohad Naharin

Sara Rudner

Jason Samuels Smith

2008

Pina Bausch

Lawrence Rhodes

Ethan Stiefel

Sylvia Waters

2007

Bettie de Jong

Bebe Neuwirth

Desmond Richardson

Wendy Whelan

2006

Todd Bolender

Eiko & Koma

David Howard

Gelsey Kirkland

Joan Myers Brown

2005

Clive Barnes

Alessandra Ferri

Donald McKayle

Jimmy Slyde

Christopher Wheeldon

2004

Jose Manuel Carreño

Chuck Davis

Anna Halprin

Chita Rivera

2003

William Forsythe

Susan Jaffe

Jock Soto

Charles and Stephanie Reinhart

2002

Nina Ananiashvili

Frank Andersen

Jack Mitchell

Tina Ramirez

2001

Terese Capucilli

Michael M. Kaiser

Susan Stroman

Damian Woetzel

2000

David Parsons

Ann Reinking

Ben Stevenson

1999

Barbara Horgan for the Balanchine Trust

Al Pischl for Dance Horizons

Jacques d’Amboise

Martin Fredmann

Kevin McKenzie

1998

Jeraldyne Blunden

Julio Bocca

Suki Schorer

Dame Ninette de Valois

1997

Claude Bessy

Anna-Marie Holmes and Bruce Marks

Dudley Williams

Hernando Cortez & Dancers Responding to AIDS

1996

Peter Boal

Savion Glover

Francia Russell and Kent Stowell

Ann Barzel*

1995

Susan Marshall

Carla Maxwell

Fayard and Harold Nicholas

1994

Christine Dakin

Kate Johnson

Jirí Kylián

1993

Bill T. Jones

Pierre Dulaine and Yvonne Marceau

Beatriz Rodriguez

1992

Darci Kistler

Meredith Monk

Helgi Tomasson

1991

Virginia Johnson

Mark Morris

Jennifer Tipton

1990

Garth Fagan

Eliot Feld

Hanya Holm

1988

“Dancing for Life”

Moscelyne Larkin and Roman Jasinski

P. W. Manchester

Kyra Nichols

1987

Merrill Ashley

Trisha Brown

Liz Thompson

David White

Doris Hering*

1985

Charles “Honi” Coles

Richard Cragun

Frederic Franklin

Heather Watts

Walter Sorell*

1984

Alexandra Danilova

Robert Irving

Donald Saddler

Tommy Tune

Dance Masters of America, Inc.*

1983

Jeannot Cerrone

John Neumeier

Michael Smuin

Martine van Hamel

1982

Fernando Bujones

Laura Dean

Arnold Spohr

Lee Theodore

1981

Selma Jeanne Cohen

Sir Anton Dolin

Twyla Tharp

Stanley Williams

1980

Patricia McBride

Ruth Page

Paul Taylor

Herbert Ross and Nora Kaye*

1979

Aaron Copland

Jorge Donn

Erick Hawkins

1978

Mikhail Baryshnikov

Raoul Gelabert

Bella Lewitzky

1977

Murray Louis

Natalia Makarova

Peter Martins

1976

Michael Bennett

Suzanne Farrell

E. Virginia Williams

1975

Alvin Ailey

Cynthia Gregory

Arthur Mitchell

1974

Gerald Arpino

Maurice Béjart

Antony Tudor

1973

The Christensen Brothers (Lew, Harold, Willam)

Rudolf Nureyev

1972

Anthony Dowell

Judith Jamison

1970

Sir Frederick Ashton

Carolyn Brown

Ted Shawn

1969

Erik Bruhn

Katherine Dunham

Carla Fracci

1968

Eugene Loring

Alwin Nikolais

Violette Verdy

1967

Carmen de Lavallade

Sol Hurok

Wesleyan University Press

1966

Edwin Denby

Margaret H’Doubler

Maya Plisetskaya

1965

John Butler

Peter Gennaro

Edward Villella

1964

Gower Champion

Robert Joffrey

Pauline Koner

1963

Isadora Bennett

Margot Fonteyn

Bob Fosse

1962

Melissa Hayden

Anna Sokolow

Gwen Verdon

1960

Merce Cunningham

Igor Moiseyev

Maria Tallchief

1959

Dorothy Alexander

Fred Astaire

George Balanchine

1958

Alicia Alonso

Doris Humphrey

Gene Kelly

Igor Youskevitch

1957

Lucia Chase

José Limón

Alicia Markova

Jerome Robbins

1956

Agnes de Mille

Martha Graham

1955

Jack Cole

Gene Nelson

Moira Shearer

1954

Dance on TV: Adventure (CBS)

Tony Charmoli (NBC)

Max Liebman (NBC)

Omnibus (CBS)

*Special award

The post Dance Magazine Award Recipients appeared first on Dance Magazine.

This year’s event was held at Chelsea Factory, where the first choreographic offering of the evening—Andrea Miller’s liquid, interconnected Pearls, performed by Harrison Ball and Patricia Delgado—was created. It was a particularly fitting tribute to Chairman’s Award recipient Jim Herbert, who not only founded Chelsea Factory but also, as Joyce Theater executive director Linda Shelton noted in her presentation, had recommended the song (“Pearls” by Sade) to Miller, one of the many dance artists he has supported and championed through his role as founder and executive chairman of First Republic Bank. “I asked, did she have a budget?” Herbert joked about meeting Miller for the first time 15 years ago, shortly after she founded Gallim. “She pulled out two little receipts. It worked out well.” In his speech, Herbert reminisced about not knowing what ballet was until 1966, when one of his colleagues invited him to attend a performance: “I fell in love that night,” he said, and his support for New York City’s varied dance scene has been unwavering since.

The theme of supporting nascent choreographic talent carried over into the presentation of this year’s Harkness Promise Awards, which grant two choreographers in their first decade of work $5,000 unrestricted grants and 40 hours of rehearsal space without expectation of a final product, funded by the net proceeds from the Dance Magazine Awards. Raja Feather Kelly, one of the inaugural recipients back in 2018, introduced Harkness Foundation for Dance executive director Joan Finkelstein, quipping, “You do have incredible taste.” Of the 2022 recipients, Kayla Farrish and Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Kelly said, “I cannot wait to be in community with you and see what you do.” Finkelstein also reflected on the last five years of Promise Award recipients: “All of them are continuing to make stunning work that opens up our field to new modes of expression.” She presented Farrish and Mercer with their awards after a video showcasing excerpts of their choreographic work. “I want to see what’s possible,” Farrish said in voiceover—a sentiment that felt ripe with (yes) promise.

A filmed interview with Brenda Dixon-Gottschild (courtesy of PBS WHYY), interspersed with performance footage, showed the dance artist and scholar in every decade from her 20s to her 70s. “Here,” she concluded proudly after the video, “you see Brenda-Dixon Gottschild as an 80-year-old.” But first, Rennie Harris paid tribute to his “dance mother,” who he first met as a teenager. “There was something about the way you spoke that made me pay attention more than I would have to any other adult,” he said. “You inspired me to think critically about street dance—Black dance. Hers is not only the voice of her generation and my generation, but of generations to come. To quote Brenda, ‘I aim to perform corrective surgery on the historical record.’ Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, I am here to tell you your corrective surgery was successful.”

Harris proceeded to surprise the audience by dancing a brief solo with all his signature precision, cleverness and intention to a song he played from his phone—bringing down the house as he danced onstage for the first time in five years. In lieu of a more traditional acceptance speech, Dixon-Gottschild movingly performed a poem by Tracy K. Smith, “We Feel Now A Largeness Coming On,” with verve and gesture that was instinctively echoed by Harris (“my wonderful aesthetic son,” Dixon-Gottschild called him) as he stood listening beside her.

In paying tribute to ballet star Herman Cornejo, outgoing American Ballet Theatre artistic director Kevin McKenzie noted that one of the pleasures of directing the company has been getting to “witness great dancers before, during and after they discover what great dancing actually is,” as was the case with Cornejo, who proves that consistency is the secret to longevity. “If he was ever afraid of anything, I never knew it,” McKenzie said. “He would in essence walk out onto the edge of a cliff, hang his toes over and revel in the feel of the wind in his face. That’s what it felt like to watch him in his full glory. Now, to see him revisit roles 20 years later, it’s astonishing that he delivers them with the same clarity of his youth.”

While Cornejo was unable to attend the ceremony, he delivered his acceptance speech in a pre-recorded video. “I’m not retiring anytime soon,” he reassured the audience with a smile, drawing laughter with the story of how he got his first contract with ABT: He was hired as an apprentice and was soon after cast in a soloist role in La Bayadère during the company’s tour to Japan; on the day of the performance, already in full makeup, he was informed by a union representative that “as an apprentice, I couldn’t do a principal role. So they brought a corps contract backstage for me to sign. So I did.” He concluded, “Nothing is impossible. Stay positive. Keep doing what you love to do.”

Kyle Gerry and Caitlin Scranton performed Lucinda Childs’ spare, luminous Étude 18, a work set to music by Philip Glass that just premiered in September—and which stood in stark contrast to Carnation, a solo of Childs’ from her Judson Dance Theater days, which Yvonne Rainer described in her presentation.

“This dance, I would say, is very exceptional in that it is not characteristic of anything she’s done since then,” Rainer said. She described Childs sitting at a table with one leg encased in a garbage bag and proceeding to put “a lettuce strainer upside down on her head, and already there’s an incredible drama and incongruity there because there is this utterly beautiful woman who is about to do some very ridiculous things.” Rainer moved to and from the microphone to gesture and mark space as she continued to describe Childs using hair curlers and kitchen sponges to create a particular image, dumping the materials into the garbage bag, and doing a handstand to cause all of the objects to come tumbling out. “This dance blew me and others who saw it away, and she never did anything like it again,” Rainer concluded before welcoming Childs to the stage to receive the “heavy object” that was her Dance Magazine Award.

Childs, reflecting on meeting Rainer and following her to Judson Dance Theater, said, “I thought it was so fantastic, but I thought it was especially fantastic to be invited by Yvonne. I think that the most important thing, then and now, has been the whole spirit of collaboration, that we work together, that we shared ideas.” After thanking her collaborators, presenters, supporters and dancers from over the years, she concluded, “Everything that makes this art form has to happen in the way it’s supposed to happen—in the way we learned at Judson: What you do with what you’re doing is just as is important as what you’re doing. So what we did with what we do, is what we did.”

Dianne McIntyre’s tribute began with a performance of an excerpt from her Love Poems to God, a soulful and surprising duet for dancer Demetia Hopkins and singer Tina Fabrique, to poetry and music by Hannibal Lokumbe. The interconnectedness of the movement and music made the feedback Jawole Willa Jo Zollar recalled receiving from McIntyre as a young choreographer all the more vivid: “She said, You’re dancing to the music, now you gotta get inside the music,” Zollar recounted. “From there I knew I was gonna follow this woman.” She described the space McIntyre created for her Sounds in Motion company in Harlem as a place that “profoundly centered the community of Harlem and Black folks from all over,” which in the ’70s and ’80s was, “a free space for us Black folk where we could create without being concerned about the white gaze. All of these people whose names I had read about, or music I had listened to, were all there in the studio and passing through.” But McIntyre had done even more, and continues to do so; Zollar shared how McIntyre had recently shown a work in progress that Zollar’s students at Florida State University talked about through the end of the semester. “She continues to be an artist that is pushing, that is exploring, that is questioning, that is supporting and nurturing new generations of artists all across this country.”

“My talk is mostly thank yous,” McIntyre admitted as she took the stage. Amidst her family (“My parents just said, ‘Go ahead, you wanna dance? Well…I don’t know…’ My mother said that, but my father said, ‘Yes! Whatever you want to do!’ “), mentors, collaborators and supporters, she made a particular point of saluting the dance writers who “didn’t put us in a box,” (among them Jennifer Dunning, Deborah Jowitt, Julinda Lewis, Sarah Kaufman and Wendy Perron) and her dance ancestors, particularly those who “did not have the fortune that I am having this evening: H.T. Chen, Eleo Pomare, Rod Rodgers, Viola Farber, Gregory Hines, Geoffrey Holder, Helen Tamiris, Jeff Duncan, Talley Beatty, Louis Johnson, Mary Hinkson, Baba Olatunji, Blondell Cummings, Pearl Primus, Charles Moore, Joan Miller, Billy Wilson, Louise Roberts, Janet Collins, Syvilla Fort…to name a few.” She concluded, “Now, I’ll soar even higher.”

While Harrison Ball and Jonathan Fahoury performed a silken excerpt from Kyle Abraham’s Love Letter (on shuffle), the choreographer’s most recent entry in New York City Ballet’s repertory, presenter Charmaine Warren took us all the way back to her first encounter with Abraham: New York Theatre Workshop, 2006, in his solo Inventing Pookie Jenkins. Warren helped make introductions to Brad Learmonth and Ellen Dennis, which led Abraham to Harlem Stage’s E-Moves and the inaugural Fall For Dance festival, respectively; both, in messages that Warren shared on their behalf, were united in praising not only Abraham’s abilities as a performer and dancemaker, but also (and primarily) his humility and warmth. “Kyle will make time for you,” Warren said. “I promise you that.”

Those qualities were at the forefront as Abraham accepted his award, giving a speech that was primarily concerned with giving thanks: to the childhood friend who got him into the performing arts, to his teachers—in particular those “who when I couldn’t afford class, couldn’t afford to eat, couldn’t afford even transportation to get to class, who let me take their classes for free”—to the companies who have commissioned him or let him restage his works and to his A.I.M family, who he invited onto the stage, as “This is not an award that I could say that I should be receiving single-handedly.”

“I moved to New York summer of 1996,” Abraham reflected, “around the time that Ulysses Dove passed away. As someone who likes making work in both the ballet and contemporary worlds, and comes from a social dance background, I always wished that I could have a conversation with him. I still wish that to this day. I still wish I could have learned from him as I’ve tried to learn from his videos. I always wish I could say thank you to him.

“We’ve lost so many artists over the years. I just want to make sure I can continue to acknowledge them and say thank you for the brilliance that you’ve created and shared with our entire world, and for inspiring me. I want to thank all the recipients tonight for all the brilliance and inspiration you’ve shared with all of us over the years.”

The post The 2022 Dance Magazine Awards Celebrated Longevity and Interconnectedness appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Kyle Abraham

It’s hard to throw around a phrase like “voice of a generation” without feeling hyperbolic. Yet it comes to mind when thinking about Kyle Abraham. No matter whether he’s tackling old-fashioned topics like love or bringing a contemporary take to issues like identity and community, this 45-year-old choreographer captures something exceptionally current in his work. Moments of all-out hustle might dissolve into soft introspection or a sexy, badass strut as he seamlessly sews together movement from the studio and the street, confirming the legitimacy of artistry from both sources. What might stand out most is how poignantly he uses the body to portray vulnerability—the vulnerability of forced machismo,­ of being Black in America, of life today. 

Abraham first became a talk-about with Inventing Pookie Jenkins, a hip-hop–inflected solo he performed decked out in a romantic tutu at New York City Center’s 2007 Fall for Dance festival. Once he formed his own company, now called A.I.M by Kyle Abraham (an abbreviation of the former name, Abraham.In.Motion), he made a splash with 2010’s Bessie Award–winning The Radio Show, looking at the loss of communication and his father’s Alzheimer’s through the lens of the closing of Pittsburgh’s only hip-hop radio station. A couple years later, Pavement, inspired by the movie Boyz n the Hood and W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, cemented his reputation as a true original. More awards and raves steadily followed. Commissions from ballet star Wendy Whelan and others led to a series of creations for New York City Ballet, starting with the jaw-dropping The Runaway, bringing Pookie Jenkins’ swagger to Balanchine’s house with hauntingly beautiful solos for principal Taylor Stanley in particular. It’s no surprise that top companies like Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, The Royal Ballet, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and others have all clamored for their own Abraham premieres. 

Meanwhile, he continues to create moving pieces for his company while investing in more than just his personal choreography. Many of the dancers who’ve worked with Abraham at A.I.M are proving to be fresh, nuanced dancemakers on their own—so much so that last summer, a festival at Lincoln Center titled “Reunions” consisted entirely of choreography by talented A.I.M alumni, like Kayla Farrish and Rena Butler. Not just an icon, but an inspiration and mentor, Abraham is paying it forward to fill this generation with several strong voices, and making the dance field richer for it.

—Jennifer Heimlich

Lucinda Childs

The name Lucinda Childs brings to mind elegance, precision and complexity born from simplicity: a crystalline minimalism so focused yet free, it approaches the spiritual. Think of her work, and you might envision the plain yet exalted figures of Dance, her landmark 1979 collaboration with Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt, inexorably gliding and turning across the stage and the scrim in front of it; or the stark celestial beings of her 1983 Available Light, guarding the tiers of Frank Gehry’s towering set with their quietly exacting steps.

From her experiments in the 1960s as a founding member of Judson Dance Theater to her current creations and restagings of past works, Childs has indelibly shaped the course of modern and postmodern dance, her influence continuing to ripple out across genres and generations.

Childs, who grew up in New York City, studied modern dance with Hanya Holm and Helen Tamiris, then at Sarah Lawrence College and the Merce Cunningham Studio. As a Judson renegade, she put everyday objects to absurdist use, perhaps most memorably in her 1964 solo Carnation, in which she wore a colander as a hat, adorned with hair curlers, and fashioned kitchen sponges into a kind of beak. Recalling the work in Patrick Bensard’s 2006 documentary, Lucinda Childs, her fellow Judsonite Yvonne Rainer said, “The power of that solo was that this completely glamorous persona was doing these ludicrous things.”

In her work of the 1970s, documented in the invaluable online resource “A Steady Pulse” (from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage), Childs turned her attention to geometry and repetition, often deploying a spare ballet vocabulary in silence. She reunited with music as the choreographer of the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach, directed by Robert Wilson and composed by Glass, in which she also performed. Of her mathematical sensibility, the dance scholar Sally Banes, in Terpsichore in Sneakers, observed: “Repetition and shifting contexts make a world of detail come alive, as the act of dancing provokes a conscious act of seeing.”

With an avid European following, Childs holds the rank of Commandeur in France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and received the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion award in 2017. Look around, and you’ll see traces of her aesthetic everywhere, from the work of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Sarah Michelson—modern dance titans in their own right—to younger artists just starting out. In recent revivals at the Museum of Modern Art and The Joyce Theater, her older works have kept revealing new layers of brilliance.

—Siobhan Burke

Herman Cornejo

What more is there to say about Herman Cornejo? It seems that every superlative has been used when it comes to this dancer. It is hard to think of another male dancer, or another dancer period, who is so universally lauded and admired. “His jump is like something out of a Warner Bros. cartoon,” Joan Acocella wrote about him in The New Yorker in 2004. “His speed is altogether abnormal….But what is most remarkable about him is clarity.” And it’s all true.

Cornejo has been a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre since 2003. Next year will be his 24th with the company, where he has now danced more or less every leading role in the classical canon. He is also a favorite of choreographers, from Martha Clarke and Twyla Tharp to Alexei Ratmansky, Mark Morris and Wayne McGregor. He is as at ease in fast, teasing roles, like Puck in The Dream, as he is when called upon to suffer, as in Manon; he can do cabrioles with a wink and a smile as Basilio in Don Quixote or be noble and touching as Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake.

It’s easy to forget that Cornejo had to fight for these roles. There was a time when, according­ to ballet’s rather confining ideas about type, he was considered too short to embody them convincingly. Like Baryshnikov before him, he convinced the higher-ups and the audience otherwise. The minute he stepped into the role of Count Albrecht in Giselle, everyone could plainly see he belonged there. Because, in addition to possessing dance chops, Cornejo projects charisma, charm, intensity and intelligence. “I see him as a hero,” Tharp once said of him, “something that’s out of vogue these days.”

Tharp is right. There is something timeless about Cornejo’s approach to dance. Even before he began training in his native Argentina at age 8, his mother would wake him at 4 in the morning so they could drop his sister Erica off in time for her own classes at Teatro Colón. He became a professional dancer at 14. From that very young age, he took his profession, and his gift, very seriously, and worked extremely hard at it. At 16, he won the gold medal at the International Ballet Competition in Moscow—the youngest winner in the contest’s history.

And perhaps because of this discipline and grit, learned at such a young age, his dancing has an honesty and purity of intention that still ring through every step he takes in the studio and on the stage. He’s a prince, through and through.

—Marina Harss

Brenda Dixon-Gottschild

A scholar, performer, choreographer and anti-racist cultural worker, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild­ holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University, is professor emerita at Temple University and is a writer for Dance Magazine, composing features on a range of topics, like “Decolonizing Flamenco Through Exploring Black Influences” and “The Power of Dance as Political Protest.” Throughout her nearly 50-year career as an author and cultural warrior, her writings, lectures, artistic presentations and intellectual charm have reminded us that we too have a responsibility to activate our activism, ebbing and flowing as we embrace Black movement influences. Her critical performance essays and post-performance reflexive dialogues serve as survival tactics with healing functions for readers, existing as glorious disruptors in both academic and concert spaces.

By expanding the discourse on values in dance, two of her seminal texts, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts and The Black Dancing Body: A Geography From Coon to Cool, encourage some readers to embrace parts of themselves they may have been taught to hate. She’s a winner of multiple awards, including the Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research (2008), and awards and fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Her research blossoms from a kind of radical resistance and remembrance, as she archives her explorations with her powerful voice, body and pen. Dixon-Gottschild coined the phrase “choreography for the page,” using her writings and her dances to express and question essential truths. Her choreographic works are often in collaboration with her husband, dancer/choreographer Hellmut Gottschild, with whom she has created and performed Stick it Out (1993), Frogs (1996) and Tongue Smell Color (2000).

A fundamental facet of Dixon-Gottschild’s brilliance is her advocacy. She empowers her audiences to legitimize their ownness…their uniqueness and, for many of us, our Blackness. Dixon-Gottschild’s tactical teachings exist at the intersection of her artistic influence and historical knowledge, thereby offering a rubric for reading, contextualizing, understanding and celebrating dance that is not necessarily Eurocentric.

Engaging with the scholarship of Dixon-Gottschild warrants reflection on larger social constructs of race and gender. Her body of work reminds us that while some of us may be vulnerable to the work that burdens us, the histories our bodies hold can also free us from that burden. Dixon-Gottschild’s work continues to be the beating heart of many emerging Black scholars’ research, as they navigate all spaces, reveling in their Blackness and understanding that their Black feet, Black butts and Black skin are symbols of unapologetic beauty, bliss and brilliance.

—Gregory King

Dianne McIntyre

This year, Dianne McIntyre celebrates the 50th anniversary of Sounds in Motion, the company she founded and directed from 1972 to 1988, and its premiere concert. McIntyre started dancing at age 4 with teacher Elaine Gibbs, and by 7 she was choreographing on neighborhood kids in her first production, presented at a local library in her hometown of Cleveland. At 25, with New York City as her dance home, her company’s debut at the Cubiculo Theatre made it official. For 16 years, McIntyre’s deep understanding that dance and music must coexist was passed on to the gifted dancers and musicians of her company. After closing the company and its school, she began making and performing works as an independent choreographer.

McIntyre’s performances, choreography, collaborations and teachings are insightful, and invariably raise the consciousness about Black people’s stories. Watching her dance and create these stories are lessons in enlightenment. McIntyre’s body is its own instrument, and one can “hear” the sounds as they are realized. She can shepherd musicians to match or follow her arms as they sweep the air, her toes as they test the floor, the swirling, spinning and tilting of her torso and the sprinkling of the imagined through her fluttering fingers. Some memorable solo performances, choreography or collaborations are: If You Don’t Know, as part of “FLY: Five First Ladies of Dance” by 651 ARTS, with McIntyre, Germaine Acogny, Carmen de Lavallade, Bebe Miller and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar; we carry our homes within us which enables us to fly, as part of New York Live Arts’ music series; and myriad choreo-poems­ alongside her longtime friend, the late Ntozake Shange. McIntyre choreographed Change for Dance Theatre of Harlem, Porgy and Bess for the English National Opera, and the films Beloved and Miss Evers’ Boys, to name a few.

There is not a single descriptor that is Dianne McIntyre. But we know that over these 50 years she cultivated the careers of many dancers, including Zollar, Marlies Yearby, Bernadine Jennings and Carole Anne “Aziza” Reid, all of whom were integral parts of Sounds in Motion before assuming leadership roles in dance, social consciousness and service. McIntyre is as effervescent in an impromptu phone call as she is cogent when planning an upcoming event. She has been honored with a Teer Pioneer Award and an American Dance Festival Award; and by Dance/USA, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Harlem Arts Alliance, and the Bessies; and has received an Emmy nomination, and fellowships from John S. Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. It’s a long time coming, but now as a capstone for her 50 years of creating and giving, Dianne McIntyre is rightfully being honored by Dance Magazine.

—Charmaine Warren

The Chairman’s Award: Jim Herbert

A Chairman’s Award, chosen by Dance Media CEO Frederic M. Seegal to honor distinctive movers and shakers behind the scenes, will go to Jim Herbert, the founder and executive chairman of First Republic Bank. A longtime supporter of dance, Herbert is the founder of Chelsea Factory, as well as a board member with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and San Francisco Ballet.

Harkness Promise Awards

Funded by net proceeds from the Dance Magazine Awards ceremony, the Harkness Promise Awards offer a $5,000 grant and 40 hours of rehearsal space for innovative young choreographers. This year’s awardees are Kayla Farrish and Johnnie Cruise Mercer.

Kayla Farrish is a New York City–based dancer, choreographer, director and photographer. “My work questions a range in human and societal experiences,” says Farrish, founder of Kayla Farrish/Decent Structures Arts. “As an African American woman from the South, with no records beyond American soil and inquiring identity, I [create] in order to see myself.” She recently collaborated with Brandon Coleman on the duet Broken Record and with Melanie Charles on Roster, co-directed a film with Charles, choreographed for Saul Williams’ Motherboard Suites, and created the dance theater feature-length film Martyr’s Fiction. Farrish is currently a rehearsal director at Sleep No More in New York City and an adjunct faculty member at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Johnnie Cruise Mercer is a queer, Black choreographer, educator, impresario and social entrepreneur based in New York City. “Led by my curiosity for embodied philosophy, my work takes action as movement responses, practices that support and acknowledge history, memory and space,” says Mercer. He works within the New York Public School system through The Leadership Program, a mentorship-based organization that uses art to cultivate leadership qualities, and is the founding producer and company director of TheRedProject/NYC. “To me, making is about embracing reality, listening, releasing and preparing for a communal, metaphysical, revolution.”

The post Honoring Legends in Dance at the 2022 Dance Magazine Awards appeared first on Dance Magazine.

The Dance Magazine Awards ceremony, including performances and celebratory speeches, will take place in person at Chelsea Factory in New York City on Monday, December 5, 2022, at 7 pm EST, with net proceeds supporting the Harkness Promise Awards. For ticket information, visit dancemediafoundation.org.

We’re thrilled to announce the honorees for the 2022 Dance Magazine Awards:

Kyle Abraham

Choreographer Kyle Abraham—recipient of a 2013 MacArthur fellowship, 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award and 2018 Princess Grace Statue Award, among many other recognitions—makes deeply powerful dance works that often speak to the Black American experience. In addition to creating for his own ensemble, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, he has choreographed for companies around the world, including The Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Lucinda Childs

Postmodern choreographer and dancer Lucinda Childs started her career as a member of the Judson Dance Theater and founded her own company in 1973. Her rich and varied career encompasses concert works such as Available Light and Dance, her seminal 1979 collaboration with Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt; operas including Mozart’s Zaide, Glass’ Akhnaten and John Adams’ Doctor Atomic; and more than 30 works for ballet companies around the world.

Herman Cornejo

An acclaimed principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre since 2003, Herman Cornejo has danced most of the leading roles of the classical canon and created more than a dozen new ballets with the leading choreographers of today. A frequent national and international guest star, Cornejo has also pursued his own artistic endeavors to foster the creation of new works. His accolades include the Gold Medal in the VIII International Moscow Competition, a New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Award for Outstanding Performer in 2013, and the 2014 Prix Benois de la Danse for Best Male Dancer. He has been appointed a Messenger of Peace by the United Nations and was recently recognized as one of America’s Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Brenda Dixon-Gottschild

Esteemed artist-scholar Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, PhD, is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, lecturer, performer and professor emerita of dance studies at Temple University. She is the author of four books centering Black dance artists and forms: Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts; Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era; The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool; and Joan Myers Brown & The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance.

Dianne McIntyre

Choreographer Dianne McIntyre is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Doris Duke Artist awardee and a three-time “Bessie” Award winner whose work is rooted in research and explores the intersection of history, culture, personal narrative and the human experience. Her five-decade career encompasses Broadway, television and film, commissions for Dance Theatre of Harlem and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and projects for her own company, Sounds in Motion, such as the adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. She had a longtime collaboration with the late playwright and poet Ntozake Shange, creator of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. McIntyre choreographed the 1998 film Beloved, based on the novel by Toni Morrison.

Chairman’s Award

Jim Herbert, the founder and executive chairman of First Republic Bank, will be given a Chairman’s Award, chosen by Dance Media CEO Frederic M. Seegal to honor distinctive movers and shakers behind the scenes. 

Harkness Promise Awards

Johnnie Cruise Mercer and Kayla Farrish are the recipients of this year’s Harkness Promise Awards, which offer a $5,000 grant and 40 hours of rehearsal space to innovative choreographers in their first decade of professional work. This award, conferred in partnership with the Harkness Foundation for Dance, is funded by net proceeds from the Dance Magazine Awards ceremony.

The 2022 Dance Magazine Awards Selection Committee

The selection committee for the 2022 Dance Magazine Awards included Dance Magazine editor at large and Dance Magazine Awards chair Wendy Perron, master teacher Sheila Barker, Dance Magazine contributor Joseph Carman, The Dance Edit editor in chief Margaret Fuhrer, Dance Media president Joanna Harp, MoBBallet (Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet) founder Theresa Ruth Howard, incoming American Ballet Theatre artistic director Susan Jaffe, New York City Center vice president for programming Stanford Makishi, Pointe managing editor Lydia Murray and former American Dance Festival director Charles L. Reinhart. The committee considered nominations from the editorial staff and advisors of Dance Magazine as well as from the dance public.

The post Announcing the 2022 Dance Magazine Award Honorees appeared first on Dance Magazine.

One of my favorite things about the Dance Magazine Awards has always been the sense of worlds colliding—the way luminaries from different corners of our industry who you’d likely never see sharing a stage or a program come together for this celebration of dance’s living legends. This year’s edition, which combined pre-recorded and live, in-person speeches and performances, was no different. (Seeing 2021 Honoree Andy Blankenbuehler chatting with 1991 honoree Mark Morris before the ceremony was a particularly wonderful sort of surreal.) But more than ever, I was reminded that our field can be—and is—one big community held together by our shared devotion to dance.

This year’s event was held at the Guggenheim Museum, so a pre-show panel with past honorees Lar Lubovitch, Wendy Whelan and Mark Morris, moderated by Dance Magazine editor in chief Jennifer Stahl, fittingly centered on the relationship between dance and the visual arts. Morris pointed out that dance is a visual art (the first of his many quips throughout the evening), a sentiment Lubovitch echoed when he praised Whelan as a tremendous graphic artist in her own right “because of the exactitude of the drawings that she made” with her body as a dancer. Whelan noted that understanding what kind of brush you are as a dance artist (“A felt tip pen? Or a big, fat paintbrush?”) is an important part of being able to work well with choreographers.

In closing, Lubovitch remarked: “The biggest difference, and why our art is so precious, is because it’s the only art that really only exists while it’s happening, and that gives it a special kind of magic, as far as I’m concerned. The grace and integrity that it requires to commit yourself to something that is basically invisible except when you’re doing it requires a kind person and a kind character.” Leave it to Lubovitch to deliver a mic drop with such eloquence.

Sean Jones, Malik Kitchen, Adrian Lee and Thayne Jasperson in Andy Blankenbuehler’s Possibilities. Photo by Christopher Duggan

The importance of not just what our honorees have accomplished but how they’ve conducted themselves as they did so proved to be a key theme of the evening. Susan Stroman, presenting to Tony Award–winning choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, recalled encountering him first as a performer who was always interested in what was happening on both sides of the table, a curiosity that has served him as both a choreographer and a director: “Regardless of where Andy is in the rehearsal room, he is a true collaborator. Always fearless, always approaching from a place of love, and always there to serve the work.”

Andy Blankenbuehler. Photo by Christopher Duggan

Blankenbuehler in turn thanked Stroman for leading by example, saying, “Choreographers have a tendency to turn into a mad scientist, tunnel vision person. Darkness can come easily because of the fear of not being able to make the sculpture move. My single hugest takeaway from my time with Stro is that she leads with generosity every step of the way. If there’s ever a time where I am good to the people around me, it is because there’s a Susan Stroman on my shoulder saying there is a better way to do it than to fall victim to the fear.” He continued to speak about how movie musicals and Dance Magazine were his sources of inspiration growing up in Ohio, giving him “a window to dream” of the possibilities of a life in dance. The piece he choreographed for the occasion was, fittingly, named Possibilities.

Tamara Rojo. Photo by Christopher Duggan

A video excerpt of Dormeshia in And Still You Must Swing drew whoops of delight from the audience. As Dianne Walker told the tap star in her presentation, “You swing like no one else.” She praised Dormeshia for the generosity of her teaching and the integrity she brings to the numerous artistic roles she fulfills, as well as in the rest of her life, where “her beautiful character and strength as a woman shines through.” She spoke of how they came from the same tap lineage, the importance of which was echoed by Dormeshia in her acceptance speech as she dedicated the award to the artists who paved the way for her. “This dance has truly been a blessing,” she said. “A blessing because it’s been everything I needed, when I needed it. It’s my friend, my therapy, my voice, my passport. The dance has always been there for me, so I do my best to show up for it.”

Alethea Pace and Richard Rivera in Pace’s Here goes the neighborhood… Photo by Christopher Duggan

The recipients of this year’s Harkness Promise Awards let their dancing do the talking. Alethea Pace performed a smart, exacting excerpt from her Here Goes the Neighborhood… with Richard Rivera, while Yin Yue showed a piece of her FoCo, dancing in sweeping unison with Grace Whitworth. Harkness Foundation for Dance executive director Joan Finkelstein presented each with their awards, which include grants and studio space (funded in large part by the net proceeds from the Dance Magazine Awards), and announced that the two of them would be back at the Guggenheim for a shared evening through Works & Process in March.

Grace Whitworth and Yin Yue in Yue’s FoCo. Photo by Christopher Duggan

Presenting to Akram Khan, Wendy Whelan spoke of how his work directs attention to finding shared humanity through collaboration: “He is a choreographer built for questioning and reinventing classical dance traditions for the 21st century.” The removing of cultural silos was echoed in his acceptance speech, during which Khan mused, “Something that my mother always told me as a child was, If some of us are unwell, then all of us are unwell. That is the context I apply to the themes I work on. I’m very interested in stories of the other, the ones that happen in the shadows. It’s really special for me that there is a recognition, to put a spotlight on the stories that are in shadow.”

Yannick Lebrun in Robert Battle’s In/Side. Photo by Christopher Duggan

Robert Battle. Photo by Christopher Duggan

Battle’s wide-ranging, laughter-inducing speech (“You know he can preach,” Jamison drawled) was dedicated to the unsung heroes of his career. He told the story of his childhood piano teacher who was diagnosed with cancer while he was studying at Juilliard, and how he would help her with errands and chores when he was home on break. One day she took him to a department store and bought him five suits; when his mother asked her why, she said, “Someday he’ll be meeting kings and queens and presidents, and that boy’s going to need a suit.” He shared that all he could think of when, years later, he was at President Obama’s White House, was his fortune in being there: “What did I have? Courage and a suit. I don’t feel that much different tonight.”

Duke Dang and Caroline Cronson. Photo by Christopher Duggan

Virginia Johnson joked that Battle was “a tough act to follow” when she presented our Chairman’s Award to Works & Process. Johnson praised the presenter for how it “bursts with a sense of adventure” and continues to lead the way for dance performance through the pandemic. Works & Process producer Caroline Cronson and executive director Duke Dang used their acceptance speech as an opportunity to announce a new facet of its support for dance artists: LaunchPAD, a new initiative that will put $2 million towards providing “process as destination” fully-funded residencies over the next two years. As Dance Media CEO Frederic Seegal put it in his opening remarks, “I can’t imagine anyone has done more for dance than Duke and his team.”

Dancer-turned-medical-professional Dr. Wendy Ziecheck was also on hand to receive a special citation for her groundbreaking work in helping Works & Process develop safety protocols for its “bubble residencies” to allow dance artists to safely gather and work together during the course of the pandemic. She closed her speech with a plea for the leaders of the dance field, as experts in what they do, to look to the experts in medicine and science as we continue to navigate the challenges of COVID-19: “One of the themes that I’ve noticed in tonight’s program is, None of us are safe until everybody is safe.”

Nicholas Van Young (right) in an excerpt from his and Michelle Dorrance’s 2017 Works & Process Rotunda Project. Photo by Christopher Duggan

The evening closed with the fruits of a pre-pandemic Works & Process initiative: an excerpt from Michelle Dorrance and Nicholas Van Young’s 2017 Rotunda Project, which made clever (and humorous) use of the sonic possibilities of the museum’s famous architecture.

The joy of sharing that performance with the audience scattered around the rotunda’s ramp brought to mind a remark made by Judith Jamison earlier in the evening: “How precious this is, this thing we call dance. Sometimes you need that space to know how valuable your presence is in the world—not just to fulfill your ego, but to do it for others.”

Missed the livestream? Get access to the 2021 Dance Magazine Awards on demand
here.

The post The 2021 Dance Magazine Awards Illuminated Possibility and Community appeared first on Dance Magazine.

If you ask a tap dancer who their favorite hoofers are, it’s not likely they’ll omit Dormeshia. Her popularity even spreads by word of foot, so to speak: Some dancers have used the term “DSE”—the initials of her full name, Dormeshia­ Sumbry-Edwards—to refer to a phrase she often executes: a grab-off variation followed by a shuffle pullback and a flap.

It’s a tight, crisp, elegant bar of music that can be graceful and enunciated, ending on the count of 4, or a rapid, machine-gun rhythm that ends on 3. She could probably come up with five other variations on the step that the rest of us would never think of—and all with impeccable clarity and unwavering gusto.

Even when improvising in her suede Pumas, as she sometimes does in short videos on Instagram, every intricacy is as clear as if she were wearing her silver heels. No matter the tune or tempo, Dormeshia nails every rhythm with ease and aplomb, transforming even a simple groove into a transfixing melody.

A protégé of Paul and Arlene Kennedy, she made her Broadway debut at age 12 in Black and Blue, later joining Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk as the show’s first and only female dancer. Defining a woman’s place in tap has become a central part of Dormeshia’s career. This past spring saw the third annual iteration of Ladies in the Shoe, a workshop she hosts during Women’s History Month, each week featuring class and conversation with a different female hoofer.

She’s been the muse of many a choreographer—such as Derick K. Grant and Jason Samuels Smith—and garnered acclaim in recent years for her own creations. With her choreography for Michelle Dorrance’s The Blues Project and her own show And Still You Must Swing, she’s shown a deep respect for, and intimate knowledge of, tap’s ties to jazz music and Black culture. We often hear tap described as a uniquely American dance form, and Dormeshia—who can now be seen on a U.S. postage stamp—fully explores that statement in her work, plumbing tap’s power as a uniting force during divisive times.

The Viola Davis of her art form, Dormeshia is a lifelong student of her craft who has won an Astaire Award, a Princess Grace Award, a Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award and two Bessie Awards. She has her peers and admirers alike at the edge of their seats, eagerly awaiting her next move and hoping that the show never ends.

Join Dance Magazine in celebrating Dormeshia at the December 6 Dance Magazine Awards ceremony. Tickets are now available here.

The post Celebrating Dance Magazine Award Honoree Dormeshia appeared first on Dance Magazine.

A former star of The Royal Ballet, Spanish ballerina Tamara Rojo is known for her spotless technique and impassioned performances that are—to quote a review by dance critic Judith Mackrell—”etched in raw emotion.” Despite her magnificent performance career, however, it is as a leadership figure that Rojo has had the most influence on the ballet world. Since 2012, she has straddled stage and office in the dual role of artistic director and lead principal of English National Ballet.

Under Rojo’s leadership, ENB has shed its reputation as a lesser cousin to The Royal Ballet. Instead, it has become the epitome of an innovative, forward-thinking ballet company equipped for the 21st century. Based in a new award-winning, state-of-the-art home, Rojo’s ENB presents classical repertoire alongside premieres by contemporary choreographers, and now digital creations via the company’s bespoke streaming platform.

Some of Rojo’s boldest moves over the past 10 years have included commissioning a reimagining of Giselle by celebrated British-Bangladeshi choreographer Akram Khan and staging surprising pieces of repertoire, such as Pina Bausch’s inimitable Le Sacre du printemps. She’s also brought in international ballet stars—such as lead principals Isaac Hernández and Jeffrey Cirio—and brought back Maria Kochetkova, making the company a major player on the global dance scene.

Throughout her tenure, Rojo has been a staunch advocate of female choreographers. Motivated by the shocking fact that she never danced in a work by a woman during her 20-year performance career prior to joining ENB, Rojo has now commissioned more than 40 works by women across the company’s programming. One of the most outstanding is Broken Wings, created by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa in 2016. With Rojo in the lead role, the ballet brought to life the colorful, surreal narratives of Frida Kahlo’s paintings, alongside emotional scenes depicting her struggles with debilitating health conditions.

Rojo has also been instrumental in shifting how female narratives are presented onstage. The lack of depth in many classical female roles recently motivated her to restage Petipa’s Raymonda, which will be her choreographic and directorial debut. Set to premiere in January 2022, Rojo’s version will depict a heroine in charge of her own destiny, recasting Raymonda as a nurse who runs away to support the Crimean War.

It’s no wonder that Rojo holds Spain’s three highest honors and a CBE, from the Order of the British Empire. Yet despite a career in the spotlight, Rojo is now preoccupied with shining it on others: She’s in the process of setting up a new ENB pipeline project aiming to help young dancers from underrepresented communities get professional ballet training, and is encouraging female artists to apply for ENB’s Dance Leaders of the Future program. “Enabling other dancers and artists to reach their potential is the most beautiful thing I could have chosen to do with my life,” she says.

Join Dance Magazine in celebrating Tamara Rojo at the December 6 Dance Magazine Awards ceremony. Tickets are now available here.

The post Celebrating Dance Magazine Award Honoree Tamara Rojo appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Andy Blankenbuehler got into dance as a 3-year-old tapper in Cincinnati, but theatergoers don’t associate him with showstopping tap routines. Nor do they identify him with cheerleader formations, swing-dance extravaganzas or hip-hop blowouts, even though his shows have had them all. It’s because Blankenbuehler numbers don’t actually stop shows—they push them forward, vibrantly, relentlessly, ingeniously. They exist in a specific moment of a specific musical.

He came to New York City in 1990 to make a career as a Broadway dancer, absorbing choreography from contemporary masters Susan Stroman and Christopher Chadman,­ and studying the work of two of his idols, Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse. Their influence pervades his work in visible and invisible ways—Fosse’s tensed line, Robbins’­ perpetual-motion machine—and he readily admits to leaning on the work of Gene Kelly and Michael Jackson.­ But, to borrow a word from one of his assistants, he Blankenbuehlerizes­ familiar dance vocabulary and makes it feel contemporary.

An obsessive researcher, Blankenbuehler immerses himself in the period and music and lyrics of each show he does. He collects all the information he can from the relevant idiom—it could be salsa, it could be ballet, it could be stepping—until he’s absorbed and understood it. Despite­ all the prep, the exacting, meticulous results are never derivative, because he thinks so rigorously about every word in every song. He likes to say that he’s not interested in dance steps on their own, that he cares only about how they reveal the character or the story. And he’s never afraid to stop the dancing cold if that will heighten the drama or bring home a moment. When the orphans of Annie or the soldiers of Hamilton freeze in the middle of a phrase, it’s not because he’s run out of ideas. It’s because he’s had one that he wants us to notice.

And notice we do. The Tony, Drama Desk, Olivier, Chita Rivera and Lortel nominations and awards he’s collected for In the Heights, Bring It On, Bandstand and, of course, Hamilton, attest to the way his work speaks to today’s audiences. The restless energy that drives his choreography also drives him to explore: choreographing for film (Cats), directing (Bring It On: The Musical and Bandstand) and dreaming up new shows (Only Gold). With his enormous store of both brains and heart, he’s showing Broadway how to make musicals that move with a 21st-century beat—pulling this 20th-century form into the current moment and beyond.

Join Dance Magazine in celebrating Andy Blankebuehler at the December 6 Dance Magazine Awards ceremony. Tickets are now available here.

The post Celebrating Dance Magazine Award Honoree Andy Blankenbuehler appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Akram Khan shows us what it means to be a global citizen of dance. Growing up in London in a Bangladeshi family, he studied the North Indian form kathak, and began melding it with contemporary dance almost 30 years ago. His solo works have built vivid worlds ranging from the delightfully quizzical Desh to the terrifying landscape of war in Xenos.

Driven by curiosity, he has collaborated with artists steeped in other traditions, leading to a new alchemy each time. Whether matching the furious rhythms of flamenco improviser Israel Galván in Torobaka or overhauling Giselle for English National Ballet, he has found humor in difference, as well as emotional common ground.

His boundless imagination helps fuel works of great theatrical power. For example, zero degrees, his collaboration with Belgian-Moroccan dance artist Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui,­ is loosely based on a haunting excursion into their lives as cross-cultural artists. Critic Deborah Jowitt wrote that“It’s about deep, soul-shaking performing, in which every move seems to flow from a wellspring of feelings and experiences…­. Everything is clear; everything is mysterious.”

Just as he crosses boundaries culturally, Khan crosses boundaries in terms of genre. He has choreographed for the movies (Desert Dancer), for a pop star (Kylie Minogue) and for a kung fu musical (Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise). He considers himself to be part of a new breed of crossover dance artists. “Artists like Hofesh Shechter, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, myself and Crystal Pite—we’re not afraid of other genres,” he said in these pages in 2019. “We’re already out of the box. We don’t belong only to the dance world anymore.”

More than a global citizen, Khan is a global leader. He believes that the world’s problems can only be solved by people of different cultures working together. His next work for Akram Khan Company, Jungle Book Reimagined, sees Kipling’s original story from the view of a child trapped in our climate-devastated world. As it tours Europe next spring, this new work promises to “help us listen to the natural world.” Perhaps only an artist with an international perspective could conceive such a large vision: a dance performance that honors the earth, art and children—”our future storytellers.”

Join Dance Magazine in celebrating Akram Khan at the December 6 Dance Magazine Awards ceremony. Tickets are now available here.

The post Celebrating Dance Magazine Award Honoree Akram Khan appeared first on Dance Magazine.

Robert Battle once told an interviewer on PBS, “Something about movement, very early on for me, signified life.” As a youngster, it wasn’t likely that he would become a dancer; Battle’s legs were so bowed he had to wear braces at night. However, once he no longer needed them, he made up for lost time by dancing every chance he could. When he wasn’t dancing, he liked to don a bathrobe and pretend to preach, sharpening the oratorical skills that he now puts to regular use as artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Today, the warmth and charm of his pre-curtain speeches and interviews make not just Ailey but modern dance feel more accessible for all of us.

Diligent and talented, Battle trained at Miami’s New World School of the Arts, then Juilliard. He danced with Parsons Dance before starting his own company, Battleworks. His choreography, including the iconic Takademe and The Hunt, tends to be challenging, powerful, intriguing and sometimes offbeat. Many works are punctuated by movements evocative of his martial arts training.

When Judith Jamison passed the Ailey torch to Battle in 2011, the then-38-year-old became just the third artistic director of the historic dance company. Since then, Battle has forged several pathways for other choreographers to flourish. Right away, Battle established the New Directions Choreography Lab, giving emerging artists the resources to create new works. Under his leadership, Ailey has also expanded its storytellers to include dynamic choreographers, such as Kyle Abraham, Aszure Barton and Wayne McGregor. Outstanding dancemaker Jamar Roberts became the company’s first resident choreographer in 2019. A year earlier, Battle had hired Rennie­ Harris as Ailey’s first artist in residence; through Harris’­ works, such as the now-signature Lazarus, the Ailey company has further delved into the richness and diversity within African-American culture, and broadened the vocabulary with which it does so.

Battle often quotes Alvin Ailey, stating, “Dance comes from the people and should always be delivered back to the people.” During Battle’s tenure, the Ailey brand has remained synonymous with authenticity, artistic integrity, inclusive storytelling and culture of the highest quality. Through his steadfast grace, humility, wit and assiduousness, Battle has helped the Ailey company, 60-plus-years on, to continue evolving, flourishing and growing ever more popular.

Join Dance Magazine in celebrating Robert Battle at the December 6 Dance Magazine Awards ceremony. Tickets are now available here.

The post Celebrating Dance Magazine Award Honoree Robert Battle appeared first on Dance Magazine.