These shots were captured by photographer Brittany Solem for our October/November 2017 print issue.

The post Arien Wilkerson Gallery appeared first on Take Magazine.

Arien Wilkerson in Hartford’s Willie Ware Park. Photo by Brittany Solem

Arien Wilkerson on his genderfluid approach to fashion:

“I want to have my ass out if I want have my ass out, I want to have my titties out if I want to have my titties out. That’s it.”

On his contextual gender fluidity:

“I definitely identify as non-binary. I feel like the hard part about my gender is having to correct people a lot. I’m okay with they, them, him, his. When we’re going out and we’re partying, it’s all girl all day long. When we’re at the club, my gender is straight up femme out the ass. In corporate settings, it’s non-binary. In the ’hood, it’s he/him/his.”

On the label “boy”:

“When I was studying African dance, everything was boy, boy, boy. I actually liked it because it was so innocent and playful. African dance has so much energy and I feel like a little boy when I’m doing it.”

On his reluctant participation in youth sports:

“My mom used to make me play basketball. You know how it is when you’re just a young queer kid who knows he’s queer—and your mom makes you play sports.”

On his “rockstar lifestyle”:

“I totally believe in the rock star lifestyle—but when rock star lifestyle can cross over into high art and fine art…you got me! But when that same rock star lifestyle doesn’t cross over into that shit, I’m like ooo, ew you sloppy. You better have some dope-ass motherfucking shit if you’re going to act like that.”

On financial sacrifices for his work:

“When I say no money, I mean no money for me. If Arien wants to go to the mall or get some ice cream, he can’t.”

On persistence:

“I’ve learned that if you want something, you’re gonna call that person. You’re gonna email this person. Then if you want something else, you’re going to Facebook friend-request everyone in that company, like all their photos, and then contact one of them. Throw yourself out there.”

Read the full profile on Wilkerson that appeared in the October/November 2017 issue of Take here.

Top image of Arien Wilkerson by Brittany Solem

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If a poster in the rest room is what it takes to turn someone on to dance, that’s fine with Norton Owen. He’s the Director of Preservation at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, which sits on 220 leafy acres in Becket, Massachusetts. The Pillow, as it’s called, is America’s longest-running international dance festival.

It is Owen’s hope that all visitors will get excited about dance and share their enthusiasm with friends the way people share their enthusiasm about favorite movies. “If we want to communicate the magic of Jacob’s Pillow, then anybody and everybody who comes, regardless of whether they know anything at all about dance, I want them to get it, to understand and catch the vibe,” Owen says. “You can’t do that unless you have some appreciation that this is a place that’s been doing this a long time.”

Buoyant, enthusiastic, and deeply knowledgeable, Owen was born in a small town in Alabama, where dance not exactly appreciated. When he came to the Pillow in 1976 as a student. “It was Utopia!” he says. It turned out it was also his destiny.

The class rehearsal pianist was Jess Meeker, who had been with founder Ted Shawn from the beginning as his composer and music director. Owen kept asking questions. Then, when a series of administrative positions landed Owen in the press office, he found himself looking up information for journalists, and one thing led to another.

Owen became the director of preservation in 1990, but he’d rather be called “Director of Connections.” He’s in charge of exhibits, audience engagement, and archives. He also coordinates PillowTalks, which include pre-show lectures and post-performance discussions.

Owen works out of Blake’s Barn, which was donated by the Hollywood dancer Marge Champion, who, with her late husband Gower, appeared in MGM musicals and on early television variety shows in the 1950s. The barn is named in honor of her late son. In 2014, when she turned 95, an exhibit was mounted there in her honor.

Blake’s Barn has an exhibit/ lecture space, the Norton Owen Reading Room, and a temperature-controlled storage area. “The building has evolved as extension of what I want to share with people and how happy I am to make this a part of everybody’s Jacob’s Pillow experience,” Owen says. “I don’t expect everyone to be a dance history buff or even interested, but to me it’s central to what Jacob’s Pillow is. It’s not just about what’s happening on the stages today, even though that’s tremendously exciting. I feel so strongly that the essence or the Pillow is the synergy of what’s happening today along with what has transpired over the last 84 years.”

Exhibits are as eclectic as the international performing groups that have been part of the Pillow’s history since the beginning. Shows can take advantage of 80 years of archives, as well as borrowed works by the likes of Jules Feiffer and Al Hirschfeld. One show featured movie musical posters. With a smile, Owen recalls installing an exhibit of dance photographs by Annie Leibovitz, who was in California at the time, while her assistant was in the gallery sending pictures from her phone so Leibovitz could tweak the placement and angle of each image.

Norton Owen, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival library, photo by Bill Wright

Next to the gallery is the Norton Owen Reading Room. “Anyone who wanders into here really is able to get the full range of what we have been over the years to whatever level meets their needs,” says Owen. “One of the things I love about how we’re about to meet those needs is that there are a lot of things out for people to browse through.”

Owen works at a stand-up desk in the corner. “I watch carefully what people look at how they react. We want to give them a wonderful experience.”

There are striking posters on the walls, dance memorabilia in display cases, and some 2,500 books. “This sends an important message to people who see only a few books on dance at a bookstore, which gives a different message,” says Owen. The Reading Room “communicates to people that dance is a serious subject that you can get at in a lot of different ways. For many people that might just be a visual—they won’t engage with books—but other people will go deeper. What I love about what we build here is that whatever level people do choose to engage we have the stuff.”

The room is ringed with monitors streaming videos. Before 1996, in a smaller space, there were only one or two monitors available in case people wanted to see something. “But people were reluctant to ask,” says Owen. “Now whenever we’re open all these screens have something playing on them. It draws them in. We select carefully. It usually has to do with whatever’s going on in the theaters.”

Downstairs is the climate-controlled storage area. When Owen first came to the Pillow, all the photographs, programs, books, and costumes were housed in a small, nasty room with no climate control. The archives hold approximately 6,000 films and videos from 1894 to present, 45,000 historic dance photos and negatives, 313,000 pages of unique printed materials, 27 trunks of costumes dating from 1915.

The area is not open to the public, but visitors do come, so Owen has staged the contents with presentation in mind. For instance, a feathered headdress is displayed next to a picture of Ted Shawn wearing the same piece. A pair of shorts worn by one of the Ted Shawn Men Dancers sits next to an image of a line of dancers wearing the same garb.

Historic photos grace the walls. Stacks of funky vaudeville-era theater trunks are tucked together. Lined up on one long wall are shelves of videotapes, films in metal cans, and CDs. The earliest item is a small mailing box of film, labeled 1918, addressed to Ted Shawn. All the movies are being digitized. Surprisingly, the old film holds up well. It’s the videotapes that are most fragile, Owen says.

Those digitized videos are being uploaded to Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive website, which was launched in 2011. It features an ever-growing collection of dance videos filmed at Jacob’s Pillow from the 1930s to today, which brings those connections Owen encourages to the whole world.

The videos are short, and searchable by era, genre, artist and playlists, such as award winners, dance icons, international artists and much more. Once you start, it’s like eating yummy candy—you just can’t stop.

One of the clips shows Marge Champion dancing with her son, Blake, in 1986. Owen recalls going through some old videos and coming across it and wondering if she had a copy. It turns out she didn’t, and he was able to get her one. Blake died in a car crash the year after that dance. To get her that film, says Owen, “That was everything.”

As if his work at Jacob’s Pillow weren’t enough, Owen is the author of A Certain Place: The Jacob’s Pillow Story, and has written numerous pieces for Dance Magazine, Performing Arts Resources, The Grove Dictionary of American Music, the International Dictionary of Modern Dance, and numerous other publications. He has also curated exhibits across the country and served on many board and councils.

In 2000, Dance/USA selected him for its Ernie Award, honoring “unsung heroes who have led exemplary lives in dance.” In 2012, the Dance Films Association presented him with its first Dance in Focus Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the dance film genre, while the José Limón Dance Foundation gave him its Preservation Advancement Award.

If you visit the Pillow and you see someone who looks like a life-sized elf, with lively eyes and a quick smile, who seems to vibrate with enthusiasm, that’s Norton Owen. Feel free to say hi and to ask a question. And don’t forget to check out the rest rooms.

Norton Owen – Director of Preservation
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival
Becket, Massachusetts
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Photography by Bill Wright

The post Preserving the Vibe at Jacob’s Pillow appeared first on Take Magazine.

In a performance space in the furthest corner of Housatonic Community College, Arien Wilkerson steadily paces towards the middle of a darkened set. Red, white, black, and silver chains hang from beams out of sight. Black and white buckets litter the floor, while above them, two strangely familiar red gas cans seem suspended in mid-air.

Wilkerson lies on his back and tugs at one of the chains, struggling to pull himself up while an ominous symphony of brass and string instruments meld with a cacophony of insect noises, the kind of bugs that chirp and whine during the hottest days of summer. By the end of EQUATORS, Wilkerson has changed outfits five times, rearranged the buckets according to a mysterious map projected above the set, and nearly seduced each audience member with several sexually charged spotlighted dance solos.

Through movement, sound, film, and conversation, Wilkerson and his team want to explore how the most marginalized populations on the planet will experience the adversity associated with climate change. Additionally, they want to lend dignity to the spaces where young black men are murdered by police, the same places rogue politicians characterize as “hell.” “[We are] taking weather and environment and transposing that upon a dark feeling of exhaustion and death,” says Wilkerson, “not just losing people. but the way that environment feels during that loss.”

Despite the artistic examination of the clash of climate, human-made boundaries, police violence, bodies and our environment, EQUATORS is a legitimately entertaining piece. Wilkerson is an expertly expressive dancer. He’s been dancing since age 12 and has been traveling the world, honing his talent, since he was 16. His decade-plus experience studying movement is on full display here, as he steps, pops, and strides through the buckets, chains and hanging gas cans with the purposeful movement of a mountain cat or a busy New York City commuter.

When away from the props on the set, Wilkerson is moving in almost complete darkness, save the special lighting for solos done in key parts of the set, “I can roam in the darkness throughout the entire piece or I can step into the light,” says Wilkerson “We wanted to light the show like a work of art and not a dance piece.”

Though the performance as a whole is a thoroughly collaborative production, (set design by David Borawski and lighting design by Jon-Paul Lorroco), it’s Wilkerson’s queer aesthetic that makes the performance unique. “It’s queer as fuck,” says Wilkerson. “This is the queerest thing I’ve ever done. I wear a lot of dresses, I wear a lot of platform heels, I want to just take it there. I was feelin’ some type of way after Moonlight, and just wanted more of that proper representation of queer people.”

Unorthodox lighting techniques, transgressive gender expression through costuming, and the practiced movement of a queer body stand out in EQUATORS, asking audience members to interrogate their expectations of someone like Wilkerson, a young, black, queer person presenting himself not as a disenfranchised minority identity category but as an individual within a fertile creative climate asserting his expertise and wielding his kinetic power.

Wilkerson plans to expand the performance and stage EQUATORS in different locations throughout Connecticut via an upcoming sponsorship from Real Art Ways.

Arien Wilkerson – dancer, artistic director TNMOT AZTRO
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Top photo Arien Wilkerson performing EQUATORS at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, Connecticut | All photos by Brittany Solem

The post Crossing Equators with Arien Wilkerson appeared first on Take Magazine.

In a former lifetime in which the person inhabiting the Oval Office had an actual vision based on facts, the arts were recognized as an integral measure of our society. President John F. Kennedy, for instance, said this about the arts: “We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda. It is a form of truth.”

Truth, of course, has taken a hit since 45 took office. That whole “alternative facts” bit. But numbers, or so the saying goes, don’t lie. So with that in mind, we took a quick look at the potential math implications of 45’s federal budget.

First the overview:

• Number of programs and agencies due for elimination: 62
• Number of programs within the Environmental Protection Agency alone: 50

Other programs due for funding cuts—or outright elimination—focus on everything from literacy to low-income home energy improvements to investigating chemical accidents. The enormous breadth and scope of impact on those least able to manage without these programs is breathtaking.

But since we’re an arts and culture magazine, we’re going to focus our hyperventilation on the potential impact of these devastating cuts to art and culture in New England. The proposed budget calls for eliminating all funding for the National Endowment for the Arts ($152 million) and the National Endowment for the Humanities ($155 million).

What NEA funding means to New England:

For fiscal year 2017, New England states received $2.591 million in NEA grants overall, according to the NEA website. Here’s who got what:

• Connecticut: 15 organizations, $310,000
• Massachusetts: 62 organizations, $1,672,000
• Maine: 11 organizations, $242,000
• New Hampshire: 6 organizations, $120,000
• Rhode Island: 9 organizations, $152,500
• Vermont: 4 organizations, $95,000

But the math adds up even less when you look beyond straight grants. Ann Wicks, communications manager for the New England Foundation on the Arts (NEFA)—one of six regional arts organizations funded by the NEA and private donations—explains. Arts organizations can potentially receive NEA dollars in three ways:

• an outright allocation of a grant the organization applies for itself
• an allocation from NEFA through NEA dollars provided to NEFA
• from NEA dollars given to state arts organizations, such as the Massachusetts Cultural Council

Wicks says about 15 percent of NEFA’s annual budget comes from NEA dollars. Beyond grants, NEFA uses those dollars to support artists in other, less direct ways, Wicks says. The Creative Ground Directory, for instance, is a free resource that lists artists and other creators around New England so that it’s easier to find appropriate collaborators for projects. In FY2016, NEFA made a total of 462 grants equaling $3.4 million. New England states received $829,947 of those NEFA grants.

In other words, the loss of funding to New England arts and humanities organizations could be even larger. “NEA support is very important to New England and the creative sector,” she says.

It’s a point that is echoed nationally. The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA), a national nonprofit that assists state arts agencies, offers this math about how NEA dollars improve the economy at large:

• The arts return $22.3 billion in tax revenue to federal, state, county, and municipal governments.
• Rural areas, low-income communities, and schools would feel the effects of this funding loss disproportionately from reductions. State arts agencies (using state and federal funds) award more than 25% of their grants to rural areas, 54% to low-income communities, and 45% to arts education projects.
• Every NEA dollar leverages more than $9 in matching funds, meaning that the impact of the NEA loss is just the beginning of the potential financial loss for arts organizations.

Cutting the NEA and NEH seem especially confusing given this math offered by NASAA: The NEA receives 0.004% of the total Federal budget, which is less than ½ of one hundredth of a percent.

That math also doesn’t add up when you consider the numbers presented by The Guardian. The British paper reports the following expenses incurred by taxpayers less than 50 days into 45’s residency:

• $56.6 million (or a cool $500,000 a day) to protect Trump Tower. That was through March 1. Assuming that Mrs. 45 stays until June for Mini-45 to finish school, that dollar amount could add another $46 million, bringing the total to $102 million.
• $3+million estimated cost for EACH weekend jaunt to golf work at his Mar-a-Lago Resort (a place where he doubled entry fees from $100,000 to $200,000 the day after he was elected).
• $97,380 for hotels for Secret Service to protect Eric Trump (that would be his son on those business interests 45 still hasn’t divested himself of) while he visited a condominium development in Uruguay. This is just one trip.

And finally this statistic: 45’s proposed military spending increase in his federal budget? $54 billion.

Something definitely doesn’t add up.

Does this irritate you as much as it does us? Here are a few links if you want to #TakeAction. See you on the streets.

Pen.org
artsactionfund.org
Change.org
The Official White House Petition to Save Arts Funding
Contact Your Representative
Arts Advocacy Day – Washington, DC
#SaveTheNEA

Top image courtesy Royal Talens

The post #TakeAction: Doing the NEA Defunding Math appeared first on Take Magazine.

“This is a story about the transformative power of art,” Vermont dancer Lida Winfield says as she glides around a stage that is bare, save for a pile of books that she circles and stands on. “This is a story about believing.”

When she graduated from high school, Winfield would not have been able to read those books. That’s because she is dyslexic, and fell behind in a school system that devalued children with learning disabilities. In her signature piece, In Search of Air: Growing up Dyslexic, the Vermont dancer employs modern dance and spoken word (both recorded and her own) to express the anger and frustration that she felt during those years. Music and movement match the content, from quick and sharp to slow and flowing, and finally joyful after she describes how a teacher taught her to learn kinesthetically, using movement to help her understand language.

Wearing a white sleeveless dress and waving a sheet of gauze behind which she sometimes disappears, Winfield mimics jumping rope in the playground and then extends her hands over her head to illustrate her words: the teacher made her wear a dunce cap. A male voice coming over a speaker suggests that this punishment reinforces dyslexics’ belief that if they fail, they see themselves as stupid.

Long Gone duet | Photo by Pauline Jennings

“The goal is to give a window into my experience,” the Bennington resident says, “and to show how important the arts are. It can also be about all who have had struggle and heartache in their life.”

Winfield has performed the piece on and off for the past six years at schools and conferences around the country and on tour in Europe, Mexico, and elsewhere. She also tours other pieces, including Long Gone, in which she and another dancer, Ellen Smith Ahern, explore how the dead live on in memory and imagination. She has performed on rooftops and in fields, woods, streets, beaches, and galleries, and often in other dancers’ projects.

“I was a kid who played outside, in the woods, and more than anything, that’s impacted the way I create,” Winfield says of growing up in a small Vermont town. She started dancing when she was two and acting when she was seven, joining a multi-generational dance/theater company at 14.

Photo courtesy the artist

Winfield finally learned to read at Landmark College, a Putney, Vermont, school for students with learning disabilities. There, a teacher taught her to learn by doing, such as spelling while doing jumping jacks or reading while moving, with the words written on big sheets on a wall. It wasn’t a straight trajectory, but afterward, Winfield got a bachelor’s degree at Goddard College, followed by a master’s degree in interdisciplinary arts. Her thesis topic was a prophetic one: “Using the Expressive Arts as a Healing Tool for Transformation.” Would that she had known that herself when she was a child, in need of her own healing.

Recession Special European Tour – Double Vision, Long Gone duet, Lida Winfield & Ellen Smith Ahern, 2011 | Photo by Marek Procházk

You can see Winfield on April 6 in the Faculty Dance Concert at Middlebury College, where she is a visiting lecturer in dance. She is scheduled to perform a duet with Maree ReMalia that is an excerpt of her new work, Imaginary. She will also perform In Search of Air in June at the Bates Dance Festival in Lewiston, Maine, which will be followed by workshops on art, disability, and training for educators.

Lida Winfield – Dancer
Bennington, VT
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Top photo Recession Special European Tour – Double Vision, Long Gone duet, Lida Winfield & Ellen Smith Ahern, 2011 | Photo by Marek Procházk

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If you’re looking for classical art, this isn’t it, and that’s exactly the point. ToUch Performance Art is making the classics accessible by yanking them from the theater and throwing them down on the dance floor of a pulsing night club. It’s sexy, it’s interactive, and it’s all based on classical art. Imagine sipping a beer and shaking your booty while a *hot* aerialist twists and slides to electronic music from silks above your head, and a trifecta of go-go dancers makes symbolic love to a conductor on the other side of the room. Makes that worn, velvet-upholstered, slightly musty auditorium seating at the symphony seem a little less appealing, doesn’t it?

The two ultra talented girl-bosses behind this organized madness are Marissa Rae Roberts and Elizabeth McGuire. They’ve been dead set on revolutionizing the way you experience theater since they met while working towards their BFAs at the Boston Conservatory of Art at Berklee. Although coming from two very different worlds of performing art—Marissa from musical theater and Liz from dance and choreography—the two shared an insatiable urge for the immersive, for meshing their art forms together to create a truly dynamic, visceral outcome. “We needed to create something where we could honor the classics and also break the rules,” says Roberts, “and put it into a context that a contemporary audience would really enjoy, and be inspired to listen to an opera or watch a ballet after our show.” Six years later, ToUch is reinventing your fine art experience to be electric, interactive, booze-infused, and, frankly, way more fun.

Photo courtesy of ToUch Performance Art

ToUch’s claim to fame is their six-years-running show, AcousticaElectronica, a strobe-light-glitter-encrusted intersection of old art, contemporary vices, and timeless tropes in classical theater. The AcousticaElectronica storyline draws inspiration from a number of pieces and symbols in classical art, theater, and music, while integrating modern dance and electronic music in a club setting with a full bar. Arnold Schöenberg‘s Pierrot Lunaire, Oscar Wilde‘s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Georges Bizet‘s Carmen are just a few inspirations for Acoustica that the average classical theater and opera buff might notice. Unfamiliar with the revered work AcousticaElectronica draws upon? No problem. The delightful sensory overload of music, lights, and performers whirring around you begs you to succumb and indulge anyway. “One of our goals was to bring classical art to a group of people that wouldn’t normally experience or see it,” says Roberts. “From the beginning, we’ve had people who are fist pumping at an opera singer who have no idea what opera she’s singing, but they’re enjoying it.”

Much like a favorite bar or club, this show is deserving of more than just one go. “It’s like Cubism,” McGuire says. “In a sculpture that’s Cubist, there’s 360 degrees of something. And that’s how AcousticaElectronica is. You come once, you’re gonna see many faces of that sculpture, but you’re not gonna get it all. That’s part of the reason people love to come back and should come back.”

Photo courtesy of ToUch Performance Art

It’s not all glitter and roses for the ToUch folks, however: they’ve come up against some challenges gaining popularity. “It’s hard to own a theater company in the United States,” explains Roberts. “We don’t have the financial support from the government that a lot of other countries have, so our decision to be a for-profit arts company was a risk. I think we had to work really hard to crack the code of what would make us financially sustainable, but also allow us to create the work we want to create. Through collaboration, we solved that puzzle. What we came up with is art and immersive theater that takes place in a commercial setting, in a nightclub where people can drink. It’s not a theater setting.”

In a deliberate pursuit to reject the “starving artist” stereotype, Roberts and McGuire founded a sister company of ToUch Performance Art to supplement and support their livelihoods as creators, called ToUch Events. So far, this immersive event design company has created custom event experiences for The Trevor Project, Boston Lyric Opera, and the Breast Cancer Research Fund, among others. “We’ve been engaging in philanthropic events more and more,” says McGuire. “We did a fall fundraiser event with The Trevor Project, which is an LGBT outreach organization, and that really inspired us. So I think we’re trying to turn our focus to those philanthropic events that we believe in, and that we feel are really important.”

BLO Gala 2015: La Traviata | photo courtesy of ToUch Performance Art

ToUch Performance Art is like seeing the symphony, opera, and ballet combined, where you can bust a serious move with a glow stick hanging from your neck and a craft cocktail sloshing onto the floor from your hand. It’s classical art that stays true to its origin while going out of its way to appeal to the modern consumer. Touch them and they’ll ToUch you back.

AcousticaElectronica has returned to its favorite local haunt, Oberon of the American Repertory Theater. Upcoming show is one June 2nd. Reserve your tickets here.

ToUch Performance Art – theater company
Boston, Massachusetts
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Top photo courtesy of ToUch Performance Art

The post Fist Pumping at an Opera Singer appeared first on Take Magazine.

Vermont Performance Lab (VPL) isn’t your standard artists’ retreat. Located in the hills of Guilford, Vermont, VPL’s mission is to provide dance ensembles with a decidedly modern rural retreat where the entire company comes together to craft new work in an intensive, dedicated space. Sara Coffey, who founded VPL in 2006 and is a former dance company manager, recognized the challenge under-financed ensembles face when trying to find working space for troupes that are in the process of developing new projects. VPL wasn’t built to host performances, but rather as an ‘incubator’ where new pieces are cultivated and brought to life.

Candice Salyers | Photo by Jeff Woodward

“An incubator is a context or set of conditions that you need to be able to make something,” Coffey says. “Our artists are working in a multidisciplinary arena, so there’s practical conditions that need to be met: a space to work in, somebody to get the space for them, production support, research support, and an organization that helps facilitate that. The artists we’re particularly interested in supporting are the underdogs. They’re the ones who don’t have a permanent company, permanent space, or permanent home. Otherwise they really wouldn’t need us.”

Part of VPL’s mission is to help integrate dance companies with folk from the local Southern Vermont community, fostering collaborations that might not otherwise exist. VPL shows have included collaborations with local farmers, community colleges, Youth Services, the elderly, and even a performance featuring trained dogs herding sheep. The work is also socially minded, with themes such as masculinity, immigration, African-American culture, homelessness, and living in an object-based society all taking featured roles in the collaborations.

Beth Gill at 2015 Open Lab | Photo by Kelly Fletcher

In addition, VPL is home to the SEED program, which was launched in 2015 to “help Vermont’s dance ecology.” Focusing on choreographers, the SEED program offers residencies to Vermont artists who, in turn, develop their work both in Guilford and Montreal, Canada, through a partner organization called Studio 303. “A SEED artist will get two residencies, a stipend, and travel support,” explains Coffey. “They have access to my experience: I know how the field works and can offer suggestions on grants, how to get their work touring, and who in the industry can help them bring that about. That’s necessary information built into the VPL program.”

Dahlia Nayar and Margaret Paek performing 2125 Stanely Street at the Danich Gallery | Photo by Kelly Fletcher

Coffey admits that not all of the collaborations are successful. “If you’re going to encourage risk taking, it’s important to have some failures.” She remains undeterred, however, crediting the Vermont community for continued encouragement and inspiration. “We’re not living in a big city where nightly performances can be a social activity. Folks want to be outside in their yards, digging in their gardens, writing their own work. We’ve been here long enough now that people give us a chance—they want to see what VPL is up to. They might not always like what we offer, but they keep coming back and that feels like success.”

Sara Coffey | Photo by Kelly Fletcher

Sarah Coffey – founder, Vermont Performance Lab
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Top photo Krissy Tate of Time Lapse Dance at VPL’s Party Under the Stars | Photo by Kelly Fletcher

The post Retreat to Move Forward appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally ran in our November 2015 print issue. 

When he was a little younger, Peter Reynolds worked in the mail room at the Hartford Steam Boiler building, one of the tallest office buildings in downtown Hartford, Connecticut, abutting I-91. He often worked solo at the end of the day, and he says that if you could have watched him, between organizing stacks of packages and envelopes, you might have seen him popping, locking, and vibrating, working on dance moves during the downtime at the end of his shift.

Peter Reynolds (left) and Jolet Creary grew up dancing in Hartford and founded Studio 860 in 2012.

“I was the last one to leave, so by five o’clock I was in there jamming out,” says Reynolds.

Reynolds, 31, also known as P-Boogie, is a dancer and an educator, and one of the co-founders of Studio 860, a dynamic studio that teaches young people the arts of hip-hop and street dance. Reynolds helped launch Studio 860 in 2012 with Jolet Creary, the artistic director, in Hartford’s Parkville neighborhood. The second-floor studio is in a converted mill complex, a few buildings up from Real Art Ways, an arts and performance space with a movie theater and gallery; just a block or so away from a new CTfastrak rapid transit station; and up the road from thriving Puerto Rican, Portuguese, and Brazilian communities.

The area code for most of Connecticut is 860, and, as the name suggests, those behind the studio take pride in its connection to the region and particularly in its Hartford roots. Reynolds and Creary, who both grew up in Hartford, have put a lot of themselves into the studio—pulling up carpets, scraping off glue, and making the floors ready for the stomping and sliding of dancers’ feet. Their lives have been transformed by dance, and they work to inspire transformation in the dancers they teach and share the stage with. Their instruction focuses on fitness, artistic expression, community, and self-possession.

Dashawn Davis is part of Studio 860’s teen competitive dance team, Elite 860.

Creary started dancing when she was a toddler, at the feet of her grandmother, who danced around the house and at practically any time. From there, Creary studied Caribbean dance traditions at Hartford’s venerable West Indian Social Club, a cultural hub in the city’s North End. Soon she was watching Nutcracker videos and taking ballet lessons as well. Videos of Michael Jackson and Paula Abdul left their mark too.

Reynolds had formative exposure to hip-hop dance as a kid at summer camp. “I had an instructor—his name was Tommy Hill, so even his name I thought was cool, because of Tommy Hilfiger,” he says. “And he was from England, so he also had an accent and everything. He was real cool.”

Reynolds remembers Hill demonstrating some moves as the two were up early one morning waiting for the day’s events to start. The counselor broke out some eye-catching tricks, isolating body parts and letting the movement ripple through his arms and shoulders like a visible energy current. “He had all these chains and bracelets on, and I remember him vibrating and ticking,” he recalls.

Street dance, hip-hop dance, contemporary African American vernacular dance—this genre has been steadily dominating mainstream American culture for decades now, maybe just slightly behind its musical counterpart. Think of the Fly Girls dance troupe from TV’s In Living Color or the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, about the largely gay and black New York City voguing scene that inspired Madonna. More recently, look to Rize, the 2005 documentary about the LA krumping scene, or to the high-profile status of Memphis jookin’ dancer Lil Buck, who has performed with Yo-Yo Ma, at a TEDx conference, and with the New York City Ballet. Or just watch hit shows like Dancing with the Stars or So You Think You Can Dance.

The increased prominence of dance means more people are interested in the subject, but it may also mean there’s a greater gap between pop culture representations and real-world connections. “Over the years, dance has become a lot more commercialized,” explains Creary, “but there’s still a lot of dance that hasn’t been seen on television in its fullest form. There’s been a lot of commercialization of hip-hop, and not just hip-hop, but also jazz, modern, ballet—everything—and even African dance.”

Creary teaches West African dance at Trinity College in Hartford. She is also the choreographer and artistic director of EQuilibrium Dance Theatre, Connecticut’s first hip-hop dance company. Though it’s only three years old, Studio 860 has evolved into a spawning ground for regional dance talent, a hub for traveling dance instructors and performers, and a supportive community of creative young people.

In late summer, student dancers gathered at the studio before heading down to an open-air jazz series at Bushnell Park, the majestic park abutting the state capitol at Hartford’s center, to raise funds for a trip to Atlanta for World of Dance, an international dance competition. Twenty-two student dancers performed on the team. Sixteen-year-old Jasmine McPherson of Hartford was one of the competing dancers, and one of the fund-raisers. The 11th grader, who’s been studying ballet since she was five, plans on pursuing a career in dance. McPherson appreciates the perspective she gets at Studio 860, the ways in which Creary and Reynolds and other instructors orient dance within culture, and how the studio is a model of a viable livelihood within the arts.

Twenty-two of Studio 860’s student dancers competed in the international dance competition World of Dance in Atlanta in August.

“It’s not that we’re just taking a class to dance; we also do a history lesson on how things started and how things progress,” says McPherson. “I’m not just learning about dance, I’m learning about the business aspect, about how you run your own studio. What it takes to fundraise, what it takes to get a business off the ground.”

Those bits of history might come in the form of a mini-lecture from Creary on the origins of some of the traditions taught at the studio, but it might also come in the form of firsthand exposure to guest artists who are foundational dancers within the genre. “Because hip-hop is so young, in reality a lot of the people that invented the style are still around,” says Creary. “So it’s easier for us to access it, to actually get some type of oral history.”

History aside, students at Studio 860 are learning serious dance. Rooted in street dance and hip-hop, the movements demonstrate a grace, control, and creativity that helps explain why this art form is captivating new audiences. Hip-hop dance, like the music, pulls from unexpected sources. Hip-hop music was built on a foundation of funk and soul rhythms, deconstructed—chopped into pieces and reconfigured with added elements. Everything from jazz, classical, film soundtracks, rock, and found sounds got stitched in, with percussive rapping in complex phrasing layered over the top. It’s an avant-garde collage of sly and high-contrast reappropriations.

The same is true of the dance. So many of the genre’s eye-grabbing moves involve a marked juxtaposition of near-stationary body parts with other body parts isolated in extreme motion, or a tendency to cultivate a series of dramatic slow-motion movements jammed against a few fierce and rapid articulations: a jutting of the head, a pivot of wrists and hands, a quick sideways bend of the knees and ankles to approximate a kind of broken-boned slump. Other moves seem to depict powerful surges of energy coursing through the body, making it ripple and bulge at the edge of what can be contained by muscle, bone, and skin. And virtuoso variations on timeless moves like the moonwalk, the wave, and the robot can still astonish audiences.

Though it’s only three years old, Studio 860 has evolved into a spawning ground for regional dance talent.

Creary and Reynolds point out that hip-hop dance uses a vocabulary of movements plucked from sources outside of dance. Elements inspired by silent films, mime, sci-fi, martial arts, animation, and stop-motion flipbooks have all worked their way onto the dance floor.

Beyond the physical skills, the sense of cultural history, and the insight into arts administration, many of the students at Studio 860 experience something deeper and more basic, notes Creary.

“A lot of our students are getting a sense of self-confidence out of this,” she says. “It’s definitely therapeutic. We have some people that come in here . . . whatever’s going on outside, when they come in here they feel an acceptance. We have a lot of people that say this is their family. There’s a sense of belonging. Even if they’re not going to become professional dancers, they’re given that opportunity to perform. They’re given that opportunity to be seen being taken out of whatever their environment is. I always say that you can do whatever you want when you’re dancing. It’s a crazy high that you get from dancing.”

Top photo Linda Miller is part of Studio 860’s teen competitive dance team, Elite 860 | All photos by Ian Barnard

The post Fly Moves appeared first on Take Magazine.

Past Take Magazine subjects and New England-based artists Lauren Fensterstock, Anna Hepler, and Roberto Lugo are among the 46 recipients of the prestigious United States Artists (USA) 2016 fellows. A panel of experts in music, theater, visual art, dance, and literature have the difficult task of choosing the winners, but they’ve once again risen to the occasion. In addition to being recognized and nominated by their peers in their respective artistic arenas, they are each awarded an ‘unrestricted’ financial reward of $50,000.

Blind Spot, 2015 | Photo by Mike Fleming

“By supporting American artists, USA is supporting creativity, free expression, and a strong diverse culture. Our Fellows cross all ages, ethnicities, and stages in their careers,” said United States Artists Interim President & CEO Sunny Fischer. “Each has a unique artistic voice that expands the creative environment of the United States. It is an honor to support these artists, contribute to their financial security, and to facilitate future works. We are encouraging the best of what American artists can achieve.”

Lauren Fensterstock | Forays and Follies, 2015 | Drexel University | Photo Constance Mensh

The Fellowships allow artists to use the unrestricted funds for whatever they need most, and so to take risks and push their careers forward. Although we’ll assume they’ll use some of it to attend the big party in Chicago celebrating all of the recipients. The 2016 USA Fellows will be celebrated at USA’s annual Artist Assembly in March 2017.

We’re so happy for all the artists on this list. Grants like these make it possible for artists to do their important work that ultimately builds creative communities that benefits all of us.

Steve Paxton and Vivian Beer – we’re looking forward to meeting you! Talk soon!

Top image Kenek Photography | Courtesy of the Wexler Gallery

The post United States Artists name their list of 2016 Fellows appeared first on Take Magazine.