INTERVIEW: DANCE NOW goes virtual for its 25th season
Photo: HUMA will perform virtually at the DANCE NOW festival. Photo courtesy of Yi-Chun Wu / Provided by press rep with permission.
DANCE NOW, the annual performing-arts extravaganza, has been bringing examples of the art form to New York City and beyond for 25 years. In 2020, the company was meant to host a large in-person celebration at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater on the Lower East Side, but now given the pandemic, their programming has been relegated to virtual viewings. The dance company plans to carry on the show and make the best of a bad situation.
Their newly revised yearlong virtual festival kicks off Thursday, Sept. 10 with the digital release of commissions by Ayodele Casel, Mike Esperanza and LMnO3, plus archival works from Tricia Brouk and HUMA. DANCE NOW will also honor Gus Solomons Jr. Sept. 24 at 7 p.m., and events are planned in October, November, February, March and May. In all, the festival will welcome the work of more than 40 dance makers.
It will be a busy year — despite the circumstances — for Robin Staff, executive producer of DANCE NOW. She will oversee the festival, with the audience members tuning in from the comforts of their home. Recently Staff exchanged emails with Hollywood Soapbox about the virtual year ahead. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
When you think about Dance Now’s quarter century of performances, what words first come to mind?
I would have to echo the words that Joan Duddy (director of Joyce SoHo, formerly the Dia Arts Center) — ‘the little engine that could.’ That is who DANCE NOW was then and who we still are today. Joan embraced DANCE NOW from its very first days and stood by us until she left us in 2015. Without her, there would be no DANCE NOW.
We are a small presenting artists organization without a venue of our own, but through our partnerships over the years (The Downtown Arts Festival, Joyce SoHo, The Great Hall at Cooper Union, Dance Theater Workshop, Joe’s Pub) we have presented 1,000-plus choreographers and their companies in over 25 unconventional venues during the past two-and-a-half decades. We have always pushed the boundaries to find non-traditional means to ignite the creative process, offer uniquely accessible programming and generate enthusiastic audiences for dance. When we made the move to Joe’s Pub in 2003, no one thought we could present dance on that tiny stage. Seventeen years later, we have created more than 35 full evening works that started as 5 minutes or less artistic gems.
Do you feel like you’ve accomplished your original goals, or do you keep setting the bar higher?
We always set our goals higher and higher. Before COVID-19, we were at the top of our game presenting today’s most talented dance innovators at Joe’s Pub during our annual festival series, as well as our Dance-mopolitan Commissioned, Featured and Shared Artist series. Our move to make the pub our home base in 2011 excited our artist base to really think out of the box and create for the intimacy and specifics of NYC’s hottest tiny stage.
The quality and the richness of the work just kept getting better and better, and our audiences responded by loyally filling our houses to capacity year after year. The artists started to take risks and present their most audacious dreams, and so did we. In the spring of 2019, we challenged Zvi Gotheiner to reimagine his critically acclaimed ‘On the Road,’ created for the much larger BAM Fisher. Zvi was resistant at first, but the result was a more poignant experience for the choreographer, the performers and the audience.
That is the magic of Joe’s Pub, which also gave birth to Doug Elkins’ beloved ‘Fräulein Maria,’ which we commissioned and presented at the pub from 2008-2010 as our annual holiday show. We never imagined that we would be bringing The Sound of Music (Elkins’ take on the timeless classic) to this cabaret setting, but we did and it was a huge success.
And, yes, I do believe we have accomplished our goals to make dance more accessible and personable by presenting a very diverse roster of multi-generational artists side by side. That has been our signature festival/showcase format since 1996, and that format continues today. It is inspiring to artists young and old, and has created a really supportive and deeply connected Dan Now community.
What can fans expect from the September program?
This season we are offering up 42 5-minute or less choreographic gifts for our fans and supporters, as well as the global public now that we are online, to enjoy as they watch from the comforts of their home. Our programming has shifted, but not our vision — we are still presenting our veterans, side by side with our younger and up and coming artists.
The September program, which launches on Sept. 10, will feature commissioned premieres from acclaimed tap dancer Ayodele Casel; Mike Esperanza, who we are excited about presenting for the first time; and the witty trio LMnO3 (Deborah Lohse, Cori Marquis and Donnell Oakley), who have performed at DN shows at Joe’s Pub many times. Archival works from Tricia Brouk and HUMA will also be presented as well as archival piece from the great Gus Solomons jr, who we are honoring on Sept. 24.
We are also telling the full DANCE NOW story as part of this 25th anniversary season. The silver lining of this online format is that we can tell it in a way that we never could have, if our programming was live this year! We are able to really feature each of the artists that we are presenting, and we have created an interactive timeline that travels through our past, present and future — sharing stories, memories and great successes that we have had in advancing the careers of the numerous artists that have come through DN — Kyle Abraham, John Heginbotham, Brian Brooks, Camille A. Brown, Robert Battle, Aszure Barton, Nicole Wolcott and Deborah Lohse, to name a few.
How much has COVID-19 disrupted the company’s plans for 2020?
We were planning a huge celebration this fall at Joe’s Pub for our 25th anniversary season, as well as the 10th anniversary season of DANCE NOW SteelStacks at the ArtsQuest Center in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, this past August. In early March we had pretty much decided to postpone everything and sit this year out. We started gathering with our community through Zoom happy hours, and that is when we decided we had to create some hope for our artist base.
We have been working non-stop since mid-March, full gear overtime energy, to reinvent our live programming online. We have tried to keep the format similar to what our artists would be doing at the pub, by challenging them to create a digital work in a space about the same size as the pub stage, and we have created monthly Artist-to-Audience celebrations with six artist hosts, a surprise archival video to honor six of our veteran artists, and an event that will recreate the fun and magic of presenting at Joe’s Pub, including a special cocktail/mocktail recipe for our attendees to join in our toast to the arts as a necessity!
Logistically how are you organizing all of this virtually?
We have learned a lot! We hired the extraordinary artist/designer Kate Ladenheim to create a platform where we could tell the DN story is six monthly chapters from September 2020 to May 2021, to be able to keep our artists working and our audiences connected. We have commissioned 19 new digital works and will be presenting an additional 17 archival works, as well as featuring six of our artists as our hosts of each post performance monthly celebration. Each month we are launching three new works, two archival works and one surprise archival video during our celebrations. We are very aware of online burn-out, so we are offering up our signature 5-minute bit-sized gems for our audience to savor as they wish from Sept. 10 through May 2021. Each monthly performance chapter is only 30 minutes or less if you watch it all together.
We have also been busy diving into our archives (and organizing them in one place for future needs) to be able to share favorite past works, programs and lots of photo images from the past 25 years.
We have been blessed to have several interns who have come on board to handle much of this labor intensive process, including organizing our now annual community Zoom gatherings, as well as the incredible technical needs to produce these digital works in the best quality, including accessibility features and captioning, as well as the complex needs to recreate the atmosphere of Joe’s Pub during our Artist-to-Audience gatherings. Hats off to my Director of Programming Ariane Michaud and my lighting designer and production manager for their incredible work these past six months.
Our private funders have been just amazing, getting us our funding mostly in advance of this programming. We are using all the resources that we currently have to offer our artists this work during this unprecedented time. Proceeds from our upcoming ticket sales, subscriptions and donations will go directly to commissioning new work into the future, for live and/or online programming.
When do you think the dance world will get back to some type of normal?
For us, the goal is to get back to Joe’s!
But, we are preparing to be online now for as long as it takes for our artists to have healthy spaces where they can create and a theater where they can perform and audiences can feel safe. Many of our artists are now scattered across the country. Truthfully, I do not know what normal looks like. That seems to be a word of the past.
We built this platform with an uncertain future ahead of us. We are still learning how to do this and will continue to refine it, so that it can keep us moving forward, and most importantly give our artists the opportunity to challenge their creative process as we have always done in the past.
We created this 25th anniversary season out of a lot of heartbreak, and while we are looking back during this celebration, we are really looking to the future. We will continue to invent, reinvent and reach for new ways to do what we love to do — present cutting-edge dance in unusual ways to bring our artists and audiences together in a visceral, powerful and meaningful way.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
DANCE NOW kicks off its 25th season Sept. 10. Click here for more information.
