Seven Questions for Pico Iyer: Build It, They Will Come
The purpose of dance, of any art, is to offer the world what it does not have enough of otherwise; so compromise, capitulating to the world, makes no sense at all.
Seven Questions for Pico Iyer: Writing … and Dancing … Against the Curve
In terms of creative work, I think we can offer the most by sitting—or dancing—away from the moment.
Leading the Dance Field Through Change
During my first few months as the executive director of Dance/USA, I engaged dance leaders from around the country in conversations about the state of the field. What are they experiencing as dance artists and managers? What issues are on the forefront of their daily work? How could Dance/USA help?
Social Media and the Arts: The Unbearable Nuance of 140 Characters
This week the social media world burst into a flurry of conversations thanks to a Wall Street Journal article that revealed the New York City Ballet was working on a social media policy for its employees and artists, and that this policy may have been driven by the Twitter behavior of a single dancer.
Shall We Dance, or Shall We Engage in Some Body-Based Movement?
What do you do when a “revolutionary,” “rebellious” art form becomes “classic”? … We need new words, new ways of thinking, and new methods of engaging with the public because our federal funding is once again under severe threat to be cut and it is up to us (as usual) to figure out how to exist, and what our existence will look like.
My Eyes, Your Body
We have habituated our gaze toward a narrow set of proportions based on the kind of dance we watch and the expectations we bring to our viewing. Our eyes have grown lazy. We simply don’t see enough professional dance with a variety of bodies on stage. And I have interviewed numerous artistic directors in the ballet and contemporary genres over the years who claim they love all kinds of bodies.
The Black Swan Effect: Fleeting Chimera, Or a Catalyst for a Second Dance Boom?
In ballet circles, a tantalizing question has generated much excitement and speculation: Is Black Swan the new Turning Point, the 1977 film that helped to popularize ballet and ushered in the high summer of “the dance boom” when Americans seemed to fall in love with dance? Could Black Swan ignite a second great love affair between Americans and classical ballet in the 21st century?
Who Does Indian Culture Belong To?
What does it mean to preserve an art form? It does not mean passing down the same memorized movement from one generation to the next. A traditional classical art form, which arises from a particular cultural context, in our increasingly global society must adapt and move forward, and these forms, historically, have always evolved. Just as ballet developed from the French and Italian courts, where an emphasis on subtle and refined manners gave way to more dazzling and virtuosic displays in the proscenium context, classical Indian dance, too, has evolved.
Myopia Stunts Art
At the end of every year, people everywhere are compelled by nostalgia and self-importance to register and announce their top however-many items of interest or note in whatever genre or form one could imagine their best-of lists. Few people, however, even those who write for well-moneyed, high-culture publications, ever seem to take Santa’s care with checking their lists twice. Others, indubitably, project their preferences for a certain naughtiness over anything one might consider nice, or good.
Seven Questions for Pico Iyer: The Pause Before the Jump
To write—to dance, to make music—is to become incomparably affluent inside and to have a sense of possibility, of freedom, of real power that nothing else can rival.