At the beginning of the COVID-19 shutdown, I felt powerless and frustrated. To fight that feeling, I sought out people in government to form partnerships with because policy is power. We created movie and trivia nights, Instagram challenges, and virtual town halls with politicians on the federal, state and local levels. Dancers from all over the country got to voice their concerns about issues ranging from Planned Parenthood to the environment, student loans to racial injustice. Participants worked together towards actual solutions. Many were able to meet in person at the 2020 Juneteenth demonstration I helped organize at City Hall in Manhattan.

From my new connections, I learned who is in control of the levers of power. But I had much to offer my friends in politics too. My talents contributed to the “wow” factor at their events, by adding live dance performances, musical interludes and fun visuals, as well as providing a direct connection to a broad and diverse demographic they needed to know more about.

Last summer, I was asked to head up social media and special events for a council member and formed an all-women team of artists to aid me. As other candidates saw what we could do, they wanted our vision and capabilities. Now I am involved in three campaigns and have placed dancers in each one. I have organized demonstrations, written articles, and recruited dancers to volunteer and participate in phone banks.

Every time I sit down with a new politician, I speak to them about living wages for artists, arts education, possible public art projects, and opportunities for collaborations in their districts. I have reached out to publications and dance service organizations around the country to help me spread the word for artists to get involved directly in their communities. I want to see more of us on the frontlines leading the charge.

So it seemed natural to take matters into my own hands and run for office. And I would like you all to join me.

I am currently running for a seat on the county committee in New York City, which is the most hyper-local elected office. County committees (which exist throughout the country with variations in names and responsibilities) set the state’s party platform, which drives policy and budget priorities that directly affect our communities and our cultural and arts initiatives. As a county-committee member, you choose local judicial candidates and party nominations in special elections, and help create policy for your party’s platform.

In New York City, each election district is made up of a small number of city blocks, each of which has two to four seats. Thousands of seats are available throughout the city, and many are left vacant, simply because people don’t know they exist and nobody runs. My goal is to fill these open seats with artists, because, quite frankly, the world needs our perspective. All it takes to run is joining a local political club, collecting signatures and voting for yourself (you can often win by just one vote!).

As this goes to print, we don’t know the result of my race, but if for some reason I didn’t make it onto the ballot, or something else went wrong, I will run again and again and again.

“I know politics can be intimidating, but I would argue that so many of our skills as dancers are transferable into this realm.” We have thick skin, aren’t afraid of the word “no” and have perseverance; we know how to work as a team, are adaptable, poised, self-reliant, detail-oriented, and probably have some practice at fundraising; we know how to communicate with people from different walks of life. Most importantly, we provide hope through our craft and create space for people to dream.

As we contemplate the similarities and differences from last summer to this one and our own personal growth during this time, I encourage you to also think about your civic duty: What is your part to play in making your neck of the woods a better place, and what does that mean to you? You can post on social media platforms, channel your activism into your creative work and show up to the ballot box. All of this is wonderful and necessary, but none of that should dissuade you from getting directly involved, as well.

Your opinions deserve to be heard. Our future needs your voice in it, so don’t rob us of that opportunity or your brilliance. Continue shining bright, Dance Fam!

As the vote count continued on Friday, people gathered in Philadelphia with banners reading “Surrender to Democracy.” They reclaimed a popular dance song, the “YMCA,” which had been frequently used by the Trump campaign. 

Later that evening, the next generation joined the celebration at Joy to the Polls’ #CountEveryVote dance party.

On Saturday in Jersey City, New Jersey, Martha Graham principal dancer—and frequent outdoor improviser—Xin Ying did an impromptu solo. 

The holidays kicked off early in Los Angeles as a crowd gathered at a gas station and found new meaning in Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You”—Biden, that is.

Backed by a chorus of car horns, a Native American man danced alongside his car in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Young people gathered for a literal “Party in the USA,” belting the Miley Cyrus hit.

In Minneapolis, a group of Native American dancers and percussionists held a socially distanced performance in the street. 

Meanwhile in New York City, James Whiteside, long a champion for LGBTQ+ rights, donned a unicorn costume to congratulate Biden and Harris on their win. 

In Seattle, residents did another round of the Cupid Shuffle, which became a dance signature of the protests throughout the summer. It’s a symbol of celebration and unity—and the work ahead.

Dance the Vote

Dance the Vote, based in St. Louis, Missouri, has commissioned a mix of local and national choreographers to create works intended to inspire participation in the election. The first few episodes, available on YouTube, include groups like Versa-Style Dance Company and Heidi Latsky Dance, with more to come.

DISCO RIOT’s Move American

Leading up to the presidential election, San Diego–based organization DISCO RIOT is presenting Move American, a series of short dance films addressing social-justice, political and human-rights issues. New films will be released each Monday through November 2. One of these is Derion Loman’s “By any means necessary,” a visceral duet with Simon Greenberg that tackles voter suppression against a stark desert background.

Paul Taylor Dance Company

Paul Taylor Dance Company took to Instagram to pose a simple but poignant message: “To have a voice, we must vote!”

Pro Dance League’s Turnout the Vote

Courtesy Pro Dance League

Online dance-class platform Pro Dance League’s election efforts are all about the numbers. Its goal? To register at least 1,000 new voters through its Turnout the Vote campaign.

Dance Lab New York and Supermajority

Choreographic incubator Dance Lab New York has partnered with Supermajority, a women’s activism group, for an October 2 virtual fundraiser called Celebrating Freedom of Expression. The evening will be hosted by Misty Copeland and includes a first look at Jeannette, a brand-new musical based on the life of Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress. For an extra dose of inspiration, the event will feature choreography by Karla Puno Garcia, Karen Sieber and Yusha-Marie Sorzano. Tickets are available for purchase here.

American Ballet Theatre

The dancers of American Ballet Theatre have taken to social media to remind us that voting isn’t just about picking who will lead. It’s about standing up for the issues that are most important to you.

Pacific Northwest Ballet

Whether you’re voting by mail, in person or dropping your ballot at an official box, Pacific Northwest Ballet doesn’t want anyone to forget this final step: the celebratory voting dance. Exercising your right to vote is always cause for celebration.

No mention of the Moor puppet being offensive. Nor was there any hint of mainstream controversy 31 years later when Petrouchka became the standout ballet of the 1942 season of Ballet Theatre (later ABT), giving a young Jerome Robbins the part of Petrouchka, a deeply meaningful role for him. Nor in 1970 when the Joffrey Ballet took it on. For decades, Petrouchka was a beloved addition to the ballet canon.

But times change and audiences change. White people are now more aware of how odious the practice of blackface was. Blackface minstrelsy was developed specifically to ridicule Black people for the entertainment of white people. We look back at those traditions as cruel and racist. In Petrouchka, the Moor is not only mean and aggressive, but prodigiously stupid. He worships a coconut when he can’t crack it open with his sword.

According to a quick internet search, the first willingness I could find of any critic to call out racism is a review of Petrouchka when ABT revived it in 2005. The New York Times critic John Rockwell wrote this: “Marcelo Gomes made a commanding Moor, with all the racist business about childlike, violent blacks intact.”

Five years later, while I was editor in chief of Dance Magazine, Joseph Carman wrote an opinion piece titled “Exotic or Offensive?” with the subtitle “Ballet’s Outdated Stereotypes Are Overdue for Retirement.” He mentioned ballets like Raymonda, La Bayadère and Petrouchka.

To offer an example of a positive action taken, I added a sidebar on the decision by Oakland Ballet in 1991 to paint the Moor doll’s face a deep blue. I thought that approach, later adopted by San Francisco Ballet, was ingenious. I called it “The Avatar Solution.”

Last semester, as I was teaching dance history at Juilliard, I told my students that Petrouchka was a beautifully tragic ballet that unfortunately has a racist character—the Blackamoor puppet, Petrouchka’s rival. While discussing the problem raised by the Moor being in blackface, I referred to the blueface make-up as a solution. As far as I was concerned, Oakland Ballet and San Francisco Ballet had solved the problem.

But my students would have none of it. They felt such a compromise did not address the underlying racism. They declared, to a person, that they would never go see such a ballet.

Sarasota Ballet learned the hard way how unpopular Petrouchka had become. During its 2015 tribute to the Ballets Russes and Nijinsky, it ran into controversy. Here is Carrie Seidman reporting in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:

“Even before the curtain opened at the Sarasota Opera House, a firestorm had erupted on social media following the posting of a dress rehearsal photo showing dancer David Tlaiye as The Moor in Michel Fokine’s “Petrushka,” [alternate spelling] in full blackface with outlined white lips.

“Given the timing—riots were ongoing in Baltimore over the death of African American Freddie Gray while he was in police custody—it seemed to many especially insensitive and inflammatory.

“The ballet’s argument, of course, was that this was a period piece, intentionally recreated with as much historical accuracy and detail as possible. But even some in the company’s normally besotted audience, seemed uncomfortable with the choice, with a diminishment of applause and a few random boos as Tlaiye took his bows.”

Concerned about the future of one of my favorite ballets, I decided that, with my class, we would reach out to Isabelle Fokine. She is the granddaughter of Michel Fokine, frequent stager of his ballets, and rights holder to Petrouchka in the United States. After my preliminary email, Isabelle replied, saying she had seen my article about the blueface decision 10 years ago. “I think the position that Oakland Ballet took is right on the mark,” she told me. However, she said she was open to hearing from my students.

As a class, we worked on a letter to Isabelle. One student suggested changing the make-up to some form of whiteface but also inserting a note about the original character into the program. Another student spoke very directly about the offense: “I know I would feel marginalized watching it. For me racism isn’t a thing of the past but a real issue I deal with every day.”

Ultimately Isabelle said she agreed with the students. She also described how her grandfather observed human behavior as research for making the ballet:

“When Fokine created the physical vocabulary of the characters, he modeled them on commuters on the St. Petersburg tram. So the overly confident man [the model for the Moor] sat with his feet pointed out and his knees spread apart, like a second position. The shy withdrawn man [model for Petrouchka] hunched his shoulders forward, toes pointed in and knees together. Fokine wanted to use what we all recognize as universal body language in a ballet to illustrate character.”

So, the blackface makeup wasn’t necessary to the character portrayal. And it wasn’t Fokine’s idea in the first place. Benois, the scene designer who collaborated with Stravinsky on the libretto, had set the ballet in an 1830s pre-Lenten fair. According to his memoirs published in 1960, he had recalled seeing a pair of silly, aggressive blackface puppets in St. Petersburg in the 1800s.

When I reconnected with Isabelle in the summer, now with Black Lives Matter protests in full swing, her thinking had evolved:

“I think we are all in agreement that he [the Moor puppet] is both out of date and inappropriate. This has been the case for a number of years. The “blue face” solution is not sufficient. . . . Since my agenda is to maintain Fokine’s legacy accurately, I have been racking my brain how this character could be changed, while still maintaining the choreography. However I think I have stumbled on the answer through one of my father’s childhood toys (of all things). I would propose to replace him with a ‘Warrior,’ based in appearance on a Cossack doll my father had. That way he could be fierce and lustful, associated with what he does, rather than a particular ethnic group.”

In a later statement Isabelle fleshed it out even more: “The Warrior’s face would be doll-like make-up with an absurdly large moustache. His hat would be an enormous shearling papakha.” To complete the picture, she plans to replace the coconut with a decorated Easter egg. And she’ll replace the pictures of palm trees in the Moor’s room with “horses galloping across the steppes.”

Hats off to Isabelle for figuring out how to uphold Fokine’s legacy. And to my students for pushing the issue. I hope this means that future generations will be able to fully experience the enchantment of Petrouchka.

San Francisco Ballet Hosts a Pop-up Food Pantry

San Francisco Ballet has partnered with the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank to turn its Chris Hellman Center for Dance into a pop-up food pantry. The idea came about after company member Max Cauthorn, who’d been delivering groceries to some of his high-risk neighbors, asked SFB executive director Kelly Tweeddale how the company could help out on a larger scale.

Since April 13, volunteers, including SFB dancers and staff, have been distributing bags of groceries to community members in need. They intend to continue every Monday, from 9 am to 1 pm Pacific, until San Francisco’s shelter-in-place order is lifted.

A volunteer packs free meals for World Central Kitchen.
Courtesy Mark Morris Dance Group

Mark Morris Dance Group Distributes Meals to Locals

On the East Coast, the Mark Morris Dance Group has partnered with Dance/NYC to become a distribution site for World Central Kitchen. Since April 20, the Brooklyn dance hub has been offering free, pre-packaged meals to local residents and employees. Meals are available for pickup weekdays from 12:30 pm to 2:30 pm Eastern, or until supplies last.

“This is a dire situation,” said Mark Morris in a press release. “I am heartened and grateful that the Mark Morris Dance Center is ready and capable of participating with Chef Andrés and the Word Central Kitchen in making pick-up meals available to anyone who needs them.” Need a lunch? Dancers are welcome.

Even as these dance organizations are financially struggling, they are doing what they can to offer kindness to strangers.

Assumptions About Identity

After first visiting the U.S. on a scholarship, in 2016 Smko got his green card and moved to New York City, where he dances for Battery Dance Company and makes solo pieces and films. For now, his focus is on creating work that foregrounds his experiences with war and immigration and addresses anti-Muslim prejudice. Yet no artist wants to be pigeonholed. “I don’t want for the rest of my life to do just one thing,” he says.

“The assumption is that if somebody is an immigrant, they are a representative of everyone from their country or their culture—or they have to assimilate,” says Alejandra Duque Cifuentes, the executive director of Dance/NYC. In 2018, the nonprofit service organization released two studies on foreign-born dance artists in New York City, and in 2019 produced Advancing Immigrants. Dance. Arts., a survey and analysis on the needs of immigrant dance artists in the New York City area. “What we found is that immigrant dance artists are making dance across all of it: ballet, contemporary, culturally specific forms, fusion work.”

As central as the immigrant experience is to an artist’s identity, many choose not to make it a focus of their choreography. Modern dancer Peiling Kao, for example, emigrated from Taiwan in 2007. Though her work may not overtly address political or cultural issues, her Asian identity is sometimes regarded as “other.” She experienced this during her 2016 participation in Hope Mohr Dance’s Bridge Project: Ten Artists Respond to Locus, in which the dancemakers were inspired by Trisha Brown’s 1975 solo.

Peiling Kao
Marley Aiu, Courtesy Kao

“When Trisha Brown choreographed Locus,” Kao explains, “one of her prompts was to help her to understand more of her movement vocabulary, to understand more of herself as a mover. I thought, Wow, I can use that as a prompt too.” So Kao, who trained in ballet, modern and Chinese dance forms, incorporated elements of classical Chinese movement into her interpretation.

“In the post-show discussion, an audience member asked me if I am trying to empower my Asian identity,” recalls Kao, now 47 and an assistant professor of dance at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. “It made me wonder, Why haven’t you seen me as a Taiwanese until you see me do Asian movement? Is my yellowness erased when I do modern, but when I do a gesture of Chinese dance, somehow my yellowness becomes even more yellow?”

Assumptions about who immigrants are based on their country of origin or their ethnicity can impact performance opportunities, as well. “A presenter might be more reluctant if they don’t already have a huge following,” says Cifuentes. “Or presenters say, ‘We already have the Latino for this season.’ ”

Barriers to Entry

In addition to the costs of training and rehearsal space that all dancers and choreographers contend with, immigrant artists tend to bear daunting financial and social burdens, says Cifuentes. “There are lawyer costs, visa costs, language barriers, social media harassment, and they often don’t know what resources they can access,” she says. “And if they are undocumented, they might face deportation.”

Those anxieties are a constant presence in Gabriel Mata’s life. Mata migrated from Mexico to Southern California at age 5 with his mother and sister, and only learned he was undocumented at 16, when he couldn’t get a job because he had no Social Security number.

“It came as a shock,” he remembers. “I navigated in a limbo state, and dance was a great way to get out of my head.” In solos like Dreaming, which blend spoken word and modern dance, “I share my personal narrative as well as financial insecurities from being an immigrant,” he says. “I also question notions of citizenship.”

Receiving DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status at 21 afforded Mata work eligibility, a driver’s license and access to higher education, but his residency remains uncertain, even though he is married to an American citizen. His experience directly informs not only the content of his work, but also its format: Solos are portable and inexpensive to create, and that helps Mata save for expenses like the biennial $495 DACA renewal fee.

“I can’t have a five-year plan to develop as an artist,” says Mata, now 28 and enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Maryland, College Park. “How will I be financially? I just don’t know. It’s just living day by day.”

Gabriel Mata
Hillary Goidell

Some immigrant dance artists are also ineligible for certain government and private grants that require U.S. citizenship. Additionally, there may also be insufficient social resources that take into account their unique needs, such as language services and fees associated with immigration.

While Cifuentes cites the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Center for Traditional Music and Dance as notable resources, she says, “by and large, there isn’t intentional support for immigrant dance artists.” Or, as Mata puts it, “As immigrants, we get the scraps of the scraps.”

The Bias Against Minorities

Immigrants who are perceived as people of color experience additional discrimination, says Cifuentes. Over a three-year period, the number of Muslim refugees to the U.S. has been decreased by 91 percent. And over the past two years, the U.S. government has put DACA protections in limbo and instituted “extreme vetting” procedures at the borders, such as the January 2020 questioning by the Customs and Border Protection agents of Iranian-Americans returning from abroad.

Contrast that with Pascal Rioult’s experience. “I was lucky, being a Western European citizen and white. Getting a green card was a really easy process,” says the New York City–based choreographer who emigrated from France in 1981, performed with the Martha Graham Dance Company for 10 years and founded RIOULT Dance NY in 1994. “That is not the case for a lot of other people, and that’s unfair.”

Well aware of his privilege, he is trying to increase equity with a youth program at Rioult Dance Center in Astoria, Queens, an exceptionally diverse neighborhood that is home to people from nearly 100 countries.

“We have kids from all different ethnicities,” he says. “We hope that training them from the bottom up will increase diversity in dance, and that eventually they will start to funnel into the company.”

Pascal Rioult leading a rehearsal
Sofia Negron, Courtesy Rioult

New Ideas Become “American”

Countless influential dance artists were and are immigrants, from George Balanchine and José Limón to Ephrat Asherie and nora chipaumire. “Immigrant dancemakers have been vital to what we know as dance today,” Cifuentes says.

Dance/NYC sees immigrant artists as a boon to American dance, and among its recommendations for fostering inclusion and equity are field-wide education on immigrant-rights issues and implicit bias, bringing more immigrant artists onto funding panels, and encouraging leading organizations to provide mentoring.

Every immigrant dance artist brings with them their unique perspective as an individual and a cultural legacy of their country of origin. Over time, their contributions get absorbed into American dance culture, and it’s easy to forget that they originally brought their ideas and identities from other parts of the world.

As Smko sees it, that’s simply one aspect of dance’s power as an international language. “The idea behind the movement is to touch your mind, regardless of who you are,” says Smko. “It’s made for humans.”

After hearing about this, I couldn’t stay silent. I wrote an op-ed for our regional paper, The Berkshire Eagle, describing how Jacob’s Pillow, like many cultural institutions, is working to create a climate of inclusiveness. “We can diversify the artists…we celebrate onstage, the dancers we teach in our school, and the representation of people of color on our board and staff,” I wrote. “What can we do to evolve our audiences so that our institution is truly inclusive?” I invited readers to share their thoughts.

The article resulted in numerous letters to the editor, and the Pillow received hundreds of responses. The great majority were supportive. One suggested that patrons should be provided with movement experiences that engage these issues. Another noted that after reading the piece, he apologized to a black person whose hair he had touched without permission.

There were a few dissenters. One writer doubted the veracity of the patron’s story. Another suggested that I had made it up for attention.

Patrons lined up to speak to me before performances, some with tears in their eyes. They couldn’t believe this had happened at Jacob’s Pillow. In truth, these kinds of experiences occur regularly to patrons and staff members of color, including our interns.

In 2017, Jacob’s Pillow created a staff cultural-competency committee and began a partnership with Massachusetts-based Multicultural BRIDGE to pursue a set of equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives. These have included everything from annual staff and board training to gender-neutral bathroom signage and crafting a code of conduct that’s printed in each program. Despite these positive steps forward, this summer’s incident revealed how much work has yet to be done.

When the patron who was harassed at the gala offered to partner with us, we created a board/staff task force that included her. We’ve made strides in the short term, like posting our statement of values across campus and online, and empowering staff members with language to use if they observe or experience a microaggression. For our guests, a contact person to whom concerns may be reported is now listed with the code of conduct in our programs.

Long-term strategies include bystander training, a campus audit with community partners, and revamping our orientation program so that new staff are better informed about the structures in place to support them. We are also thinking about how to welcome companies from other cultures that may have a different relationship to gender and religion.

So why did this op-ed touch such a collective nerve? In part, I think it’s because of the divisive rhetoric coming from some of our national leadership. But also because cultural institutions have been too slow to recognize the racism and bias embedded in our structures—and have overlooked their implications for too long. I see many institutions working to advance equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility within their organizations, partially out of a desire to draw a broader range of audience members. But we’re missing a big piece of the equation right now if we don’t think more intentionally about the climate we are creating for the audiences we wish to attract.

I believe we need more education—and accountability—in conversing civilly and respect­fully across differences. We need to discuss the many facets of implicit bias, from small to large, so that we all can learn what is and is not appropriate, and create more genuinely welcoming environments for all people.

I’m deeply grateful to the patron who was brave enough to tell me her story. She told me she could not have written an op-ed herself because raising the issue might endanger her school-aged kids. If she’d written it, she said, her piece would never have gotten the attention that my piece, written by a white woman of privilege, did.

As arts leaders, we must do all we can to be advocates and allies. If we want to be both leaders and citizens of our communities, we have to consider who feels that they belong at our institutions, and act in ways that will truly broaden the pathways to inclusion.