ADF 2009: When modern marries ballet, creatively

In the house of dance, the way between ballet and modern was once barre-d. Modern dance, a reaction against the rigid traditions and formalism of ballet, had no use for grands jetes or entrechats – it was intended to be a new, freer form all its own. Dancers did ballet or modern – not both. 

As Charles Reinhart, head of the American Dance Festival, said in January, “When I started in dance, it was take for granted that a ballet dancer could not do a [Martha] Graham piece or a [Jose] Limon piece.”

But barriers fall and the inflexible purity and antipathy of the two styles have given way over the years to creative and unique blends of both.  “We’re talking about a world where the wars have kind of dissipated,” Reinhart said.

To explore what’s going on in the innovative demilitarized zone, the ADF 2009 is focusing on modern-dance choreographers who have infused works with ballet and vice versa. They include some of the contemporary dance world’s greatest talents: Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Laura Dean, Ohad Naharin, Mark Morris and Shen Wei.

The ADF, which will take place this year from June 11 to July 25 at its home base of Duke University in Durham, N.C., has announced a 2009 lineup of works featuring eight world premieres,  one U.S. premiere and four reconstructions of older pieces. Here’s the list:

World Premieres: Shen Wei’s Re- Part III, performed by Shen Wei Dance Arts; Emmanuel Gat’s Winter Voyage, performed by Emanuel Gat Dance; Jonathan Wolken’s Redline, performed by Pilobolus; a new work by Avshalom Pollack & Inbal Pinto, performed by Pilobolus; a new collaborative work by H. Art Chaos choreographer Sakiko Oshima and musician Alan Terricciano, performed by ADF dancers; a new work by Faye Driscoll, performed by ADF dancers; and Mark Dendy’s Would you please restate your answer in the form of a question? and Golden Belt.

U.S. premiere: Shen Wei’s Re- Part II, performed by Shen Wei Dance Arts

Reconstructions: Laura Dean’s Infinity, performed by ADF dancers; Laura Dean’s Night, performed by Aspen Santa Fe Ballet; Twyla Tharp’s Sue’s Leg, performed by Aspen Santa Fe Ballet; and Rosie Herrera’s Various Stages of Drowning: A Cabaret, performed by ADF dancers.

And here’s an extra something new for dance fans: daily online video coverage of the festival at www.americandancefestival.org.

Shen Wei Dance Arts, Re- Part 1

Saving Detroit creatively

TIME magazine has a great story this week about Detroit trying to reimagine itself as a smaller, greener city with gardens and urban farming where dense neighborhoods used to be before the auto industry started dwindling decades ago.

Those interested in the revitalization of post-industrial cities, especially in the U. S. Rust Belt, should read the part about scores of artists taking over the Russell Industrial Center’s one million square feet of  vacant, decaying space and starting to give the structure new life.  It’s another vivid example of the power artists have to redevelop troubled communities if they’re encouraged to take over abandoned buildings, generate economic activity and fuel community spirit.

For more information and stories about the role of artists and other creative people as urban rescuers, read the executive summary of From Rust Belt to Artist Belt, a white paper issued by Cleveland’s Community Partnership for Arts and Culture following its May 14, 2008 symposium of the same name, which drew experts in arts and community development from around the nation. For the full report, go to www.cpacbiz.org.

Detroit’s Russell Industrial Center

From the arts hearing: signs of progress and one epiphany

The numbers are grim. Artists suffering unemployment at twice the rate of other workers. Ten thousand nonprofit arts organizations nationwide in real danger of closing and taking 260,000 jobs with them. Arts and artists losing more of their tiny piece of the nation’s 40-percent-smaller philanthropic pie to other causes such as health, while ticket-sales drop, forcing severe cost reductions including lay-offs.

And yet, scary as the information was that emerged from yesterday’s House Education & Labor Committee hearing on the impact of the arts on the economy and employment, it may not impress an American public that’s been listening to the sound of the world collapsing for months now. Bad news is everywhere – with banks failing, the stock market falling down a mine shaft, the newspaper industry dying and real estate worth about as much as Confederate dollars, the arts industry’s plight probably doesn’t seem any more important than the retailers’ or automakers’ or the airlines’. All of us are, or have friends, in trouble.

In fact, the American public may never fully understand just how stunning this hearing was – not because it revealed an arts industry in financial crisis, but because it revealed one with an economic, social and political clout that artists and their supporters could hardly have imagined even 10 years ago.

For generations – centuries, really - artists in the Western world have been despised as vagrants and low-order servants, shiftless eccentrics, dreamers, emotional basket cases and addicts, at best impractical and at worst morally dangerous. Their work may have been enjoyed, even prized, but they themselves seemed permanently marked as a kind of untouchable class by both the wealthy holders of power and the starchy keepers of bourgeois industry and respectability.

In 20th-century America, the public’s perception of artists as elite beggars, drains on the public and private coffers of prosaic, hard-working citizens, kept artists and their enterprises largely exiled from the circles of civic and economic influence – as generally disregarded as women by the bluff, tough, masculine money-makers and political power brokers.

And now? In the last decade or so, through the hard work of advocates, agencies and artists themselves, arts and culture  have begun to be more widely recognized as the vital economic and social forces they are. Giant money-generators and employers, irreplaceable educators, international ambassadors, community unifiers amd developers - the arts have been discovered to be all of these. And more: the key, along with all other creative professions, to our economic future.

How did they get to this point and how they should go on? The answer to both is education – not just the formal education of our children, which is indeed crucial, but the education of the public. Research, from RAND reports on the value of arts in schools to the economic-development studies of “The Rise of the Creative Class” author Richard Florida, has provided the tools; indefatigable public-awareness campaigns by leaders from Americans for the Arts down to local arts-council directors have provided the force. Slowly for a long time and now, at last, rapidly, they have been wearing away the blinders and barricades that have kept Americans from seeing the truth about the arts.

After perhaps a thousand years of advocates trying to persuade Western societies that art was valuable because it was good for the spirit, we’re seeing  two completely practical themes – the job-training benefits to children and the financial benefits to local economies - completely change how community leaders think about the arts.

Artists need not be afraid that positioning their work as a kind of grease for the wheels of capitalism will result in art losing its true value. Those capable of being moved by art always will be. But it’s absolutely essential that the very many who believe art has nothing whatever to do with them come to understand that art is, at least, important to their own prosperity. Their education must progress.

Luckily for advocates whose job it will be to continue that education, actor Tim Daly has discovered the next significant tool: technology.

America is in love with technology as an economic driver and as entertainment. And as Daly pointed out during his testimony at yesterday’s hearing,  ”Without art, there’s no iPod.”  It was a moment of head-smacking epiphany for some of us – what he meant was, without design, without artistic content, our beloved music players, computers, flat-screen TVs, CDs and DVDs would never have come about. No one would be scrambling to get cell phones with camera, game and internet entertainment functions or satellite radio with a zillion music stations or Wiis with their lifelike sports experiences or endless other products that those with artistic and creative skills have made more imaginative, exciting, effective, comfortable or beautiful.

Daly’s is a message that the American public – and American businesspeople and politicians - will understand: The arts create the cool, money-making products we want. Other ideas will likely emerge from the Education & Labor hearings this spring, but even if none did, this one might be powerful enough to take the arts movement to a whole new level.

Video of arts hearings available

The first video segments of today’s House Education & Labor Committee hearing on the arts, economy and employment are now available at the links below. The testimony by actor and Creative Coalition representative Tim Daly(brother of Tyne Daly)  is especially thought-provoking. He points out the vital relationship between the arts and new media technology – including all the jobs and revenue technologyrepresents -  by saying succinctly: “Without art, there’s no iPod.”

Click on these links for observations by hearing chairman U.S Rep. George Miller, U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and Tim Daly.

Additional testimony will be posted here as the day goes on, so keep checking.

You can observe the arts hearing this morning

U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) will be in action today, chairing the House Education & Labor Committee arts hearing at 10 a.m. EDT to explore the relationship of the arts industry to the national economic and employment situation. You can catch the whole thing live on webcast by clicking http://edwork.edgeboss.net/wmedia-live/edwork/16137/300_edwork-2175stream_070124.asx or, if you can’t be online then, come back later and see the highlights at http://www.youtube.com/user/EdLaborDemocrats.     

If you’re in the Washington, D.C., area, you can attend the hearing, titled “The Economic and Employment Impact of the Arts and Music Industry,” by going to the House Education & Labor Committee Hearing Room, 2175 Rayburn House Office Building.

More experts join Miller arts hearing

A new message that arrived yesterday from the office of U.S. Rep. George Miller says that no specific results from the upcoming Thursday House Education & Labor Committee hearing on the arts, the economy and employment can be anticipated right now.

The e-mail said, “It is a little premature at this point to know what will come from these hearings because a variety of viewpoints will be shared about the cause and effects of the economic downturn on the arts and music industry. ”

Miller’s online outreach specialist, Mike Kruger, did report that subsequent arts hearings will continue the discussion about the value of the arts to local communities and the economy.

 Meanwhile, the list of experts testifying at the Thursday hearing  has increased by a few names:  Joanne  Florino, executive director of  the Roy H. Park  family’s Triad Foundation, Inc.,  in Ithaca , N.Y.;  Bruce Ridge, musician and chairman, International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians, Raleigh, N.C.; and John Thomasian, director, National Governors’ Association Center for Best Practices, Washington, D.C.

It’s Miller time – to answer questions about his arts hearings

How hard should it be to get a U.S. Congressman to answer a few questions about his own public actions?  Well, you be the judge:

For about six weeks now, I’ve attempted to get U.S. Rep. George Miller to respond to some specific questions about the arts hearings he plans to hold as chairman of the House Education & Labor Committee. As I reported yesterday, these committee hearings will begin Thursday by examining the impact of the American arts industry on the nation’s economy and employment.

But in spite of cheerful assurances from Miller’s online outreach specialist that responses would be forthcoming, I have not received answers to these questions:

U.S. Rep. Miller moves forward with arts hearings

Here’s an update on the Congressional-level arts hearings I mentioned back in February:

The economic role of the U.S. arts industry and the disproportionate job losses it may be suffering in the current recession will be examined by the House Education & Labor Committee in hearings starting Thursday, March 26.

Titled “The Economic and Employment  Impact of the Arts and Music Industry” and chaired by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.),  the initial hearing will investigate how American communities are affected economically by arts activity. The committee will also examine the the arts and music industries in light of media reports about heavy job losses and endangered institutions, economic troubles reflected by a National Endowment for the Arts study that found unemployment in the arts to be substantially greater in 2008 than the national unemployment level for that year.

U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), who co-chairs the Congressional Arts Caucus, will provide testimony, as will Robert Lynch, head of Americans for the Arts; Michael Spring, director of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs; Michael Bahr, education director of the Utah Shakespearean Festival; and Tim Daly, co-president of the Creative Coalition, an arts, education and First-Amendment-rights advocacy organization co-founded by the late Ron Silver.

I expect to have more to report on this soon.

It’s Friday – Creativity Talent Show!

   “Choosing Sides,” by Paul Aho

Mark Morris Dance, “Falling Down Stairs”

“Cosmic Burst,” by Stuart Haygarth

A creative, common-sensical bailout solution – again

My fellow Geniocity blogger, Peter Friedman, got exasperated Tuesday by the AIG bailout. Yesterday, he floated a solution to that absurdly Byzantine mess and it brought to my mind an e-mail that made the rounds last fall.

It was forwarded to me by a friend and I posted it in my blog of Oct. 10, 2008. Signed by “T.J. Birkenmeier, A Creative Guy and Citizen of the Republic,” it suggested, in essence, using the federal bailout money to help average citizens rather than the gi-normous conglomerates whose own rapacity had caused their collapse. Divide up the billions among ordinary Americans, Birkenmeier suggested, and let them use it for their mortgage payments, college tuitions, small businesses, vehicles, washing machines and all the other necessities they’re having trouble affording - thus supporting the banks, universities, manufacturers, stores, major employers and other organizations that are teetering financially.

The idea sounds sensible and fair, as well as ingeniously simple. I’d rather have my tax dollars go to keeping Americans in their houses, jobs and colleges than to sending some incompetent and grossly overpaid executives on vacations to visit their offshore bank accounts.  Wouldn’t you?

So Birkenmeier wanted to know, and I do, too – why wouldn’t that work?  Anybody? Anybody? Ben Stein?