Note: This article was first published in Stance on Dance’s fall/winter 2024 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

Just over two years ago, Toronto-based street dancer Bobby “Pocket” Horner got the break that many dancers dream of: a spot in a Broadway musical. Cast as the nonbinary character Rumour in the popular musical & Juliet — a jukebox show of pop songs by hitmaker Max Martin that imagines the life of Shakespeare’s Juliet had she lived — Horner thrilled audiences. Fans raved on Instagram, “We couldn’t take our eyes off you!” “Your dancing is spectacular. I was drawn to your dance style for the entire performance.” The New York Times described Horner as “electrifying” and noted that the audience went wild when Horner performed freestyle street dance at the top of the show.

Just before their Broadway debut, Horner spoke to the Toronto Star about their experience in the play. “It feels like the most aligned I’ve ever been, in my whole life, doing anything,” they said.

By last July, though, Horner was in a different place. Dancing on Broadway was no longer a Disney fairy tale but closer to a Shakespearean play, full of light and shadow. At a New York City coffee shop, Horner, who exudes warmth, spoke with candor about their love of street dance and the highs and lows they encountered as a nonbinary artist performing on the Great White Way.

Broadway, Horner said, has brought “such a beautiful opportunity and so many things on paper that seem so climactic and epic.” They performed with the cast of the musical at the Tony Awards Show and on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Good Morning America.

But Horner, 31, also described a culture clash. In the world of street dance, they can express how they’re feeling in the moment or what’s happening in the world. “I think that’s what art is — the responsibility to reflect the times,” they said, quoting Nina Simone. “But doing the same show eight times a week, it’s hard to stay connected.”

The “intense” and “almost militant” training Horner received while studying street dance — specifically popping, locking, and breaking — prepared them for the physical demands of Broadway, they said. Yet when they performed and even battled, it was for short periods of time. Dancing in eight shows a week plus rehearsals strains the body. In July, Horner was nursing a year-old knee injury. “It feels like being in the Olympics with no off-season,” they said. “Even football teams have off-seasons.”

Dancing on Broadway was not Horner’s aspiration. “It was never something that was even on my radar,” they said.

Although Horner was first inspired by dance when they were eight years old and saw Michael Jackson’s Thriller video on a tiny television in the basement of their home in suburban Ontario, it wasn’t until high school that they took their first dance classes. They studied what was offered at their arts high school — ballet, modern, and jazz. Occasionally, guest artists came to teach hip-hop. One artist, Melissa Nascimento-So from City Dance Corps in Toronto, spotted Horner’s potential and encouraged them to audition for her studio’s pre-professional program. Horner hesitated, but after their high school dance teachers told them they had what it took to dance professionally, they went for it. They got into the program and began training after graduating from high school.

At City Dance Corps, Horner met Andrew “Pyro” Chung, an established street dancer, who invited them to audition for a new street dance academy he was starting. Horner, who struggles with stage fright, was so nervous they almost skipped the tryout. But a friend encouraged them, and they went for it. Horner wasn’t familiar with street dance at the time, and a lot of the terminology, such as twist-o-flex, walk out, and master flex, went right over their head. They thought they had bombed the audition.

Yet, Chung and his partner Mariano “Glizzi” Abarca were sufficiently impressed by what they sensed of Horner’s talent and hard work that they invited the 21-year-old dancer to join their new Footnotes Elite Training Camp on a provisional basis. Horner had three months to prove they had the mettle for the program. They did. The rigorous training clicked, Horner said. “I was able to learn so fast and in a way that was so fulfilling.”

Chung has since become Horner’s mentor, and Horner says they became obsessed with popping when they learned about it at Footnotes. The dance style, which started in the US in the 1970s, involves tensing and releasing muscles in time to music beats in ways that make the dancer appear to move mechanically. Michael Jackson trained and danced with early poppers like Timothy Earl Solomon, known as Popin’ Pete. Horner sought out workshops with popping pioneers and was stunned to learn they had been zombies in Thriller, the video that had fascinated them as a kid.

In 2018, Horner and three friends from Footnotes created a dance crew, House of Hunniez, to perform and compete at events and battles in Canada and the US. They choreographed their own pieces and battled at freestyle events.

A year later, in another twist of fate, Horner landed a coveted spot in Disney’s Zombies 2, which was filmed in Toronto. At the audition, the film’s hip-hop choreographer Jennifer Weber played a Bruno Mars song. “I remember just going off,” Horner said. Everyone in the room started cheering and screaming,” they said. “It was the first time I was like, ‘Oh wow, I have something to offer.’” Horner’s agent told them after they landed the job, “Now, they’re just looking for people like you,” Horner recalled.

Weber’s next big job was choreographing & Juliet, and she remembered Horner. In 2021, Horner was invited to audition for the musical.

At that point, Horner wasn’t dancing. The pandemic prompted them to step away and reflect on their role as a white person in dance culture and the fact that they enjoyed an unfair privilege performing an art form that was created by Black and brown people. People who saw them on stage would tell them they had never seen anybody move like that before. “And I’m like, that’s crazy because I have,” Horner said. “There are tons of members of the POC community who can do what I do, but they aren’t given the same space or opportunity to show their skills.”

The break also let Horner see that they were living two lives. Street dance had allowed them to access their masculinity. “Living in that, being able to feel that in my body, never felt weird or uncomfortable,” they said. “I thought it had to do with just dance, but it really had to do more with who I was.”

So when Horner read the script for & Juliet, which celebrates queer love and gives Juliet a nonbinary best friend, they saw a mirroring of their own life. By then, Horner had started transitioning, and they thought they would be safe in a show that was “inherently very gay, very trans.”

But Broadway, they realized, still had some catching up to do. “Even working on a show that has these characters and works with these themes, I’m still a nonbinary person in a very binary industry,” Horner said. As the show progressed, though, Horner was able to advocate for changes and accommodations that made the show more comfortable and their experience more affirming.

Looking back, Horner thinks being nonbinary gave them an edge in landing the role. But, based on some of the initial choreography, audience members didn’t always see them that way. At the stage door, Horner said, fans would say things like, “You go, girl! You were amazing. Wasn’t she great?” Horner appreciated the love but was pained by the misperception, they said.

Horner is grateful to the show’s creators for being open to change, and the dancer has found upsides to being a nonbinary performer on Broadway. The visibility has allowed them to be a role model for aspiring dancers. They started accumulating a roster of students and taught classes to people of all ages who wanted to learn street dance. “I’ve made such beautiful connections with families and students who see themselves in me,” they said.

Ultimately, though, nearly two years on Broadway were enough for Horner. They planned to step back as soon as their contract ended in October, if not before. “I could be doing something much braver,” Horner said. They have no intention of returning. “I’m going to prioritize my healing and health moving forward,” they said.

“I would love to continue performing, but in ways that address the time we’re in, the time I’m in,” Horner said. They want to help the world heal through dance, through movement. “Hopefully this has given me enough exposure for people to trust me with that.”

~~

Bonnie Eissner is a writer, editor, and public relations professional. You can see samples of her work at linktr.ee/bonnie_writing.

The post Street Dancer Bobby “Pocket” Horner Steps Back from Broadway appeared first on Stance on Dance.

I’ve been running Stance on Dance as an online publication for 12 years and publishing a print edition for three years now. In that time, I have never tired of discovering new corners of the dance world. I am honored to continue that vein in this issue.

In these pages, you’ll discover more of dance’s incredible richness as a practice and form of expression: Snowflake Calvert describes Queering Cultural Forms, a program of the Queering Dance Festival that provides a platform where traditional cultural dances are explored and enriched through a queer lens. Julia Allisson Cost details the process of painting a picture book, and how she experienced the process as similar to choreographing. Bonnie Eissner profiles Bobby “Pocket” Horner, a street-dancer turned Broadway star who asks difficult and important questions about the nature of working on Broadway. Erin Malley shares the ways in which the Argentine tango world is in flux after the pandemic. Jessie Nowak reflects on the agony of artmaking as she created the sci-fi dance film Emerging. And Donna Schoenherr makes the point for better aging in dance opportunities through her work at Ballet4Life and the nonprofit Move into Wellbeing®.

Additionally, I interviewed Zazel-Chavah O’Garra, director of ZCO/Dance Project, about how her brain tumor surgery catalyzed her passion for integrating dancers with disabilities, and Vicky Holt Takamine, master hula teacher of Pua Aliʻi ʻIlima and the executive director of PAʻI Foundation, about how she is working to preserve and perpetuate native Hawaiian arts and cultural traditions for future generations. Finally, Erica Wilson renders raw and surrealist moments in dance in her quest to capture gesture and flow.

I learn something new every time I edit a story or interview a dance artist, and I feel I’m just getting started understanding the breadth and depth of this field. If you have a stance on dance, please get in touch at emmaly@stanceondance.com. I look forward to learning from you too!

GET YOUR COPY OF THE Fall/Winter 2024 PRINT ISSUE NOW!

Illustration by Erica Wilson

The post The Fall/Winter 2024 Print Issue! appeared first on Stance on Dance.

Note: This article was first published in Stance on Dance’s spring/summer 2024 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

On a Sunday night last November, about 250 people, many of them dance enthusiasts and experienced social dancers, packed the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City to learn salsa moves from choreographer, dancer, teacher, and musician Sekou McMiller.

Accompanied by the reverberating rhythms pumped out by DJ John John, the lesson and subsequent dance party topped off a works-in-process presentation of McMiller’s latest choreography. Titled Shine, the jubilant performance featured a mash-up of choreographed partnered Latin jazz dances, such as mambo, salsa, and cha-cha-cha, and moments of individual, improvised dancing, called shines.

The breakouts gave McMiller and the six other dancers who joined him moments to react to the jazz and soul rhythms that emanated from Sebastian Natal, who played percussion, piano, and bass.

Shine by Sekou McMiller at Works & Process at the Guggenheim on November 5, 2023. Presented in partnership with Jacob’s Pillow. Photo: Works & Process / Erick Munari

“I’ve always said, ‘Live your life,’ if you’ve ever taken a class with me,” McMiller said in an onstage discussion between the dance numbers. The dancers did just that as they performed.

Later, when he demonstrated the salsa moves in the rotunda, McMiller, tall and broad shouldered, reminded the buoyant crowd to do the same. “Live your life,” he called out at intervals during the social dance.

The short phrase encapsulates McMiller’s approach to dance and to his own life. A former corporate accountant and classical flutist, he is an admired dancer and an influential dance teacher. He is also gaining attention for high-energy choreography that fuses Afro Latin jazz dances with contemporary urban styles, like hip-hop.

McMiller is an adjunct professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, The Ailey School, the Joffrey Ballet School, and Marymount Manhattan College. His Ailey School jazz dance class was featured in the documentary Uprooted: The Journey of Jazz Dance, which is now streaming on Max. And he was recently appointed the curator of special projects at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.

He has performed and choreographed for a range of artists, such as salsa singer Gilberto Santa Rosa, rapper Pitbull, and Madonna. Through his own dance company, he explores the African and Caribbean influences of Afro Latin jazz dance, urban dance, and modern jazz. In 2017, he received a fellowship from the Alvin Ailey Foundation’s New Directions Choreography Lab and a residency from the CUNY Dance Initiative to create I Am Pulse, the second installment in what he calls his “Afro Latin Jazz and Soul Experience” series.

Shine is the latest in that series. McMiller created it during a 10-day residency at Jacob’s Pillow, the famed dance center in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. The residency culminated in the Guggenheim performance.

Melanie George, an associate curator of artist initiatives at Jacob’s Pillow, proposed McMiller for the selective Pillow Lab residency. “I think a lot of people know Sekou as a great teacher,” George said, “and I know him as a great artist and an incredible mover, just effortlessly rooted and graceful and inventive. It’s a language that he speaks fluently. That’s the kind of artist that I would always want to support.”

During an onstage interview with McMiller at the Guggenheim performance, George prompted him to talk about his versatility in dance and music styles. “How is it that you landed on what you do?” she asked. “I have these languages in my body from these dances, this vernacular in my body,” he said.

McMiller, who is 49, grew up on the West Side of Chicago, the second youngest of seven siblings. “I’m the same age as hip-hop,” he said during an interview a few weeks later. “As a young person, I was a hip-hop dancer carrying a cardboard box with me.” An older brother had a boom box, and they both danced and battled with the kids on the next block. They followed early rappers like LL Cool J and KRS-One. “Hip-hop was this extremely positive experience in my youth,” McMiller said, observing that the push for profit changed the music and the messages.

When house music swept Chicago in the mid-1980s, McMiller became a house dancer. “Dance was always there in my life,” he said.

Sekou McMiller at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem’s Juneteenth Black Music Month celebration at Jackie Robinson Park in 2023. Photo by Sekou Luke.

Dance was a part of family life too. At gatherings and parties with his mother’s friends and his aunts and uncles, he and his six siblings would dance, put on plays, and perform music. A brother played the organ. His sister played the flute.

When he was around 11 or 12, McMiller would slip into his sister’s room to teach himself the flute. As a high school freshman, he bragged to his music teacher that he could play the flute and was assigned the instrument, even though he wanted to try saxophone. But he took up the challenge. He stayed after school to practice and became good enough to qualify for the Merit School of Music in Chicago, which led to him also joining the Sherwood Conservatory of Music and then and the elite Chicago Teen Ensemble, a group of six young musicians who included Anthony McGill, now principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic, and Demarre McGill, now principal flute of the Seattle Symphony.

It was at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where McMiller studied accounting and musical performance, that he encountered Latin American culture for the first time. “That’s when I got exposed to salsa music and going out dancing, and I fell in love with it,” he said.

McMiller returned to Chicago to work as an accountant. In the evenings, he played flute with orchestras and chamber groups. “That was a heck of a situation, being in corporate America in the 90s with dreadlocks; it was not easy at all,” McMiller said. He would go salsa dancing as a form of therapy.

He rose to become the chief financial officer of a company based in Chicago and Cincinnati, and over time, dance became a steady sideline. Informal gatherings in his apartment where he showed friends his salsa dance moves snowballed into paid teaching gigs. Eventually, he was flying out most weekends to places across the country and around the world — Europe, Africa, Asia — to teach and perform salsa and Latin dance.

When his employer announced that it was moving to New York, McMiller took the opportunity to make dance his full-time job. He didn’t want to live in New York, he said. He also knew that “dance was inspiring me more.”

Sekou McMiller performs in Shine at Works & Process at the Guggenheim on November 5, 2023. Presented in partnership with Jacob’s Pillow. Photo: Works & Process / Erick Munari

He went broke before he acknowledged he had to change his spending habits and become his own accountant. He righted his balance sheet, and in 2007 he was invited to New York to help re-choreograph and be part of a show.

He accepted the job with no plans to stay in the city, but he fell in love with New York. “All I had known before was this career of traveling around as an artist, and it was weighing on me,” McMiller said. “I didn’t see what could be built until I came here, and I saw a way I could build as an artist, as an educator, as a practitioner, and it would be enough to live.”

Now, as a New Yorker who has taught and studied Afro Latin dance around the world, McMiller intends to braid together music and dance styles that originated in Africa into works that allow audiences to “witness through these fusions a great reunion of cultures that were once one,” he explained.

“It’s like a great family reunion when you come and get together with your cousins” and trace your family tree, McMiller said. “That’s what I feel like people witness when watching the work.”

Sekou McMiller at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem’s inaugural Juneteenth Black Music Month celebration at Jackie Robinson Park, 2022. Photo by Nir Arieli.

McMiller’s choreography in Shine exemplifies his effort to push partnered Latin social dances forward by looking to their roots in West African dance, African American jazz, and Caribbean and American dance cultures.

That exploration began in 2016 when he traveled to Cuba to study Afro-Cuban folkloric and modern dances. He returned in 2017, and in 2018 was invited to study at the École des Sables (School of the Sands) in Senegal, the renowned school founded by Germaine Acogny, considered the mother of contemporary African dance. That residency sparked new choreography and a desire to reimagine “storytelling in dance theater with a contemporary African dance language,” McMiller wrote in a crowdfunding post in 2019.

Shine revives the improvised solos that are woven into the tapestry of African and African diasporic dance and music, McMiller observed. They stretch from Sabar dance and drumming in West Africa to styles such as tap, mambo, and hip-hop, he said.

Some of the Shine choreography returns in April with a performance at the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center in Queens, New York, that is part of McMiller’s second CUNY Dance Initiative residency.

Shine is also a prelude to a new project: a musical about the Palladium Ballroom, the Manhattan nightclub considered the home of mambo, which, from 1947 to 1966, was the city’s hottest dance scene. As New York’s first integrated nightclub, the Palladium attracted a who’s who of musicians, dancers, and actors. Marlon Brando, Bob Hope, and Dizzy Gillespie were regulars. The preeminent Latin jazz bands played there: Machito and his Afro-Cubans, Tito Puente, and Tito Rodríguez.

“Shines were a huge, huge part of that era,” McMiller said. “Partnered dancing was amazing but it was less intricate than the shines.”

In July, he’ll return to Jacob’s Pillow to develop his Palladium musical as a choreographer and director in the musical theater program, and he’ll bring his company to perform at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival this summer.

At the Shine performance at the Guggenheim, McMiller expanded on a mambo duet he and dancer Desiree Godsell performed in Harlem in June 2022 and at Jazz at Lincoln Center in June 2023. In the Guggenheim version of the dance, A Stroll in Harlem, they left transitions between choreographed steps open to individual interpretation and created room for brief solo dance breaks. Adding to the improvised feel of the jazz dance, other partnered dancers joined them on the stage, turning the duet into a group dance. And tap dancer Calvin Booker brought a rhythmic percussion to the dancers’ moves.

“Sekou gave us a lot of bandwidth to interpret, to bring ourselves to the dance,” Godsell said about workshopping Shine at Jacob’s Pillow. “And he said this several times, ‘Live your best life.’ So, if you are living your best life, there’s a sense of autonomy that you have over your body.”

Sekou McMiller and Desiree Godsell perform in Shine at Works & Process at the Guggenheim on November 5, 2023. Presented in partnership with Jacob’s Pillow. Photo: Works & Process / Erick Munari

That spontaneity, which is essential in social Afro Latin dance, is what McMiller wants to bring to his performances. “It’s the lack of individualism, the lack of allowing the individual to explore and become creative in their own space” that’s missing when dances such as salsa and mambo move to the proscenium stage, he said. “Shine is an exploration and a mandate to bring that to the stage.”.

~~

Sekou McMiller presents Afro Latin Soul, an evening-length performance by Sekou McMiller and Friends, at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center in Queens, New York City, on April 26.

Bonnie Eissner is the director of communications at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and a writer who covers culture, history, politics, science, and more. You can see samples of her work at linktr.ee/bonnie_writing.

The post Making Afro Latin Jazz Dance ‘Shine’ With a Reunion of Styles appeared first on Stance on Dance.

Dancers are, almost by definition, passionate about dance. Have you ever met a dancer who is not? So, it follows that most dancers have strong opinions about the field, and Stance on Dance’s recently published spring/summer 2024 print issue is full of strong opinions! I personally love a good dance polemic. It shows how invested dance artists are in making the field a better place. I am honored and pleased to publish a few critical and heartfelt voices in this issue: Bradford Chin’s cogent argument why higher education needs to make dance training more accessible, Lauren V. Coons compelling case for making academic arts programs truly interdisciplinary in scope, and Dr. Stephanie Potreck’s severe words for company directors who still elevate and subjugate dancers based on weight.

In keeping with Stance on Dance’s mission of covering dance from the perspective of underrepresented voices and access points, I’m pleased to share my interview with Margaret Grenier, director of Indigenous dance company Dancers of Damelahamid, Bonnie Eissner’s profile of Afro Latin jazz dancer and choreographer Sekou McMiller, Jill Randall’s interview with Joti Singh of Duniya Dance and Drum Company, which amplifies voices from the South Asian and African diasporas, and my interview with Helen Mason, artistic director of Propel Dance, a new all-wheelchair dance company.

Finally, dance is such a visceral experience that it often catalyzes other art. In this issue, Erica Wilson’s poetry explores position, weight, and sound, while Rebecca Zeh’s mixed media visual art showcases the exultancy of dancing outdoors. I hope the breadth of stances on dance in this issue inspires your own poem, art, piece of music, or other creative act. I like the idea of dance both being an inspiration and a response.

Whether you feel a dance rant or a poem coming on, I want to hear it! If you have a strong opinion about some aspect of the dance world, or feel drawn to draw when in the studio, do get in touch with me at emmaly@stanceondance.com. We dancers are, by many measures, a passionate people.

GET YOU COPY OF THE SPRING/SUMMER 2024 PRINT ISSUE NOW!

Illustration by Rebecca Zeh

The post The Spring/Summer 2024 Print Issue! appeared first on Stance on Dance.

The Jellicle Ball, that frisky feline song and dance number at the heart of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s blockbusting musical Cats, will take on a whole new meaning in June when the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York City restages the play as an LGBTQ ball.

The concept is the brainchild of Bill Rauch, artistic director of PAC NYC. The idea came to him, he said, as he was preparing to mount a queer version of Oklahoma!, the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he was previously the artistic director.

He first imagined the song Memory being sung in a gay bar. But then, after spending time with the material, it dawned on him: “Cats is not set in a gay bar,” he said. “It’s literally a ball. It’s a competitive ball.”

Eight years later, he and three other co-creators — co-director Zhailon Levingston and co-choreographers Omari Wiles and Arturo Lyons — are collaborating with Lloyd Webber’s production company, Really Useful Group, on a reincarnation of Cats that will center on human characters vying to win an LBGTQ ball and the prize of a new life.

Omari Wiles, Arturo Lyons, Bill Rauch, and Zhailon Levingston, Photo by Matthew Murphy

The new show, Cats: “The Jellicle Ball,” will be a fusion of musical theater and ballroom culture. Ballroom beats and sounds will be layered into Lloyd Webber’s original orchestrations. Vogue, hip-hop, and house dance styles will feature prominently, but jazz, modern, and ballet—reminiscent of the original—will be there too, the creators say.

A few months before opening night, the four lead creators reflected on this reimagining of a Broadway classic and what the show might mean for musical theater and for the LGBTQ community, especially the members of that community who, like Wiles and Lyons, have found a home in New York’s ballroom culture.

Wiles, who is from Senegal, grew up steeped in traditional West African dance. His parents founded the Maimouna Keita School of African Dance, and after the family moved to the U.S., Wiles took part as a performer and later assistant director. But in high school, he realized he needed a more authentic way to express himself. He discovered voguing, which, he said, saved his life. “I really owe it to ballroom and vogue for giving me the opportunity to express myself in a way that I felt like I couldn’t because of my family, because of my background,” he said.

Twenty years after being invited to his first ball, he has achieved legendary status and is the founding father of his own house, or dance family, the House of Nina Oricci.

In 2019, he started his dance company, Les Ballet Afrik, to share the experiences of Black and Latino members of the ballroom community through choreography that mixes vogue, African, and Latin dance styles. Less than a year later, the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series commissioned him to create New York Is Burning, an homage to Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning that depicted New York’s underground ballroom community of mostly Black and Latino gay and trans men and women who lived together in Harlem in found families, or houses, and vied in lively and fiercely competitive dance and fashion balls. Wiles had become a fixture in that community by the time Rauch invited him to choreograph Cats.

Omari Wiles, Photo by Matthew Murphy

Together with PAC NYC gender consultant Josephine Kearns, Wiles and Rauch began to envision the fashion and dance categories, such as runway, face, realness, old way vogue (think Madonna), and vogue fem, in which the human characters, from the once glamorous Grizabella to the flashy Rum Tum Tugger, of their new production will compete. That selection process has continued to evolve, Rauch said, as he, his co-creators, and the cast collaborate in workshops.

Wiles, meanwhile, realized he couldn’t choreograph the dance-intensive show alone and invited Lyons to join him. They had just finished season two of Legendary, the Max ballroom reality series, which Lyons’ house, the House of Miyake Mugler, won, defeating Wiles’ house. But offscreen, the two are close. Lyons, an icon in the ballroom community, is Wiles’ mentor and friend. “He became my ballroom uncle; he became my life uncle,” Wiles said.

Lyons has been in the ballroom world since 1997. Over the years, he’s taken inspiration from the costumes and makeup of the original Cats for balls he’s been part of, and, he said, he’s still in disbelief to be creating this new version. “Just the word ‘musical’ alone still blows my mind,” he said.

Arturo Lyons, Photo by Matthew Murphy

He feels pressure, he acknowledges, to make the production as good as or even better than the original. Added to that is the knowledge that people in the ballroom community have never had a musical about them or with them. “Doing good for my community definitely keeps me up at night,” he said, “because I want to make them proud and still take the Andrew Lloyd Webber tradition and uplift it even further.”

Wiles echoed that he loves working with the all-LGBTQ cast and with people of different shapes and sizes. “It’s really giving them an opportunity in musical theater that you don’t see these days,” he said. “I have so many friends who get discouraged because they’re like ‘Oh, I don’t fit the mold.’ We want to create a world for them.”

Co-director Levingston, whose roots are in musical theater, sees Cats as the right show to bring the ballroom community into the world of musical theater. He still remembers being enchanted by Cats when, as a young boy growing up in Louisiana, he watched the 1998 video of the musical.

Zhailon Levingston, Photo by Matthew Murphy

Cats, like A Chorus Line, he said, made the ensemble the subject of the show. It even had a female choreographer — Gillian Lynne. “It wasn’t exclusionary in terms of who could participate in this world,” he said of the show, “it was actually wildly inclusive.”

With the new production, Levingston and his co-creators are bringing together cast members who are legends in the ballroom community who’ve never been in a musical with people who have only done musicals. Even the creative team reflects the collision of these cultures, Levingston observed. “We don’t want either one of those worlds to be a correction for the other world,” he said. Instead, they intend to create something entirely new.

“It’s really its own beast,” Rauch observed.

Bill Rauch, Photo by Matthew Murphy

One aspect of the original will be preserved, though. As with the London version of Cats, the set will be immersive. Audience participation is expected. “At a ball, the spectators, the audience, they’re not sitting down quiet,” Wiles said. “They’re rooting for the person that they want to win. They’re shouting for a house.” He added, “That’s the energy that we want the audience to also be embodying… because that’s going to make the entire theater feel like a ball and not just a show.”

Above all, Wiles and his co-creators hope this new Jellicle Ball will spark joy. “I want the audience to be entertained,” Wiles said. “I want them to be surprised. I want them to still have a reminiscence of the original Cats, but to see it in a whole new lens.”

~~

Cats: “The Jellicle Ball” at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York City opens on June 13 and runs through July 14, 2024.

The post ‘Cats’ Struts Back to the Stage as an LGBTQ Ball appeared first on Stance on Dance.

I love interviewing dance artists. It allows me to speak with someone I normally wouldn’t and ask them directly about their inspirations, perspectives, and goals. I’ve been doing interviews for more than a decade, and I’ve come to love platforming artists.

When putting together this issue of Stance on Dance, I was tickled when several writers pitched interviews, profiles, and conversations with artists they admire. When I recruit contributors for each issue, I essentially give them carte blanche, asking them to write about their own work, a phenomenon in the field, or another artist they are interested in. While there is immense value in all the above, I like when contributors opt to cover other artists because it gives readers a glimpse into the minds of both the writer and their subject. It’s two for the price of one.

I’m also delighted about the various genres included in this issue: swing, body music, vogue, physical theater, flamenco, bharatanatyam, contemporary, belly dance, ballet, pole, and somatics. I’m proud to see Stance on Dance covering so many facets of the dance ecosystem.

This issue includes Bonnie Eissner’s interview with Caleb Teicher of Sw!ng Out, Ana Vrbaški’s essay on the New Balkan Rhythm Festival in Serbia, my interview with vogue and physical theater artist Willyum LaBeija, Shebana Coelho’s meditation on connecting dance with Urdu poetry, my interview with Leslie Streit and Robin McCain about the historical significance of the Harkness Ballet, Jill Randall’s conversation with Darrell Jones about endurance, longevity, and rest, Nikhita Winkler’s interview with tribal fusion dancer Alhazar, Julianna Massa’s profile of her pole dance teacher Irlanda, and my interview with fat somatic practitioner Jules Pashall. Magical realist illustrations are by Liz Brent-Maldonado.

As always, copies of Stance on Dance’s print publication are donated to college dance programs and other dance learning spaces around the US. To date, Stance on Dance has partnered with faculty at 25 programs to help ignite interest in the possibilities of dance journalism. And even though I’ve been running Stance on Dance for more than a decade, my own understanding of the possibilities of dance journalism is always being augmented too!

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To learn more or get your print copy, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

Cover art by Liz Brent-Maldonado

The post Expanding the Possibilities of Dance Journalism appeared first on Stance on Dance.

BY BONNIE EISSNER

Photos by Grace Kathryn Landefeld, provided by The Joyce Theater 

Note: This article was first published in Stance on Dance’s fall/winter 2023 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

In June, SW!NG OUT, the critically acclaimed presentation of Lindy Hop, directed by Caleb Teicher, returned to The Joyce Theater in New York City following a national tour. Part performance, part dance party, SW!NG OUT brings the Jazz Age dance into its second century.

Invited by the Joyce to direct a swing dance show in 2019, Teicher, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, collaborated with renowned Lindy Hoppers Evita Arce, Nathan Bugh, and LaTasha Barnes, as well as bandleader and composer Eyal Vilner—a creative team Teicher dubbed the Braintrust—to conceive SW!NG OUT.

Caleb Teicher in SW!NG OUT

At age 30, Teicher has already won two Bessie Awards for tap and jazz dancing and is known for innovative choreography and performances with diverse musicians, from beatboxer Chris Celiz to the National Symphony Orchestra. SW!NG OUT is Teicher’s ode to Lindy Hop. As the Braintrust members write in a program note, “By assembling genuine, swing-dance superstars in an improvisatory space, this show offers a unique glimpse into their universe: the modern, Lindy Hop scene.”

The first act, called “The Show,” is a mixture of choreographed and improvised dances by the 12 cast members, who include Teicher and the other Braintrust members. The pieces both pay homage to the 1920s Harlem roots of Lindy Hop and offer contemporary twists. Women dance with women or lead men. In one number, Bugh dances solo without music. In another, the dancers create the music through their tapping feet and clapping hands. The show also includes signature routines such as “The Big Apple Contest,” which swing legend Frankie Manning choreographed in the 1930s. The mood is contagiously upbeat. The dancers smile as they swing, and on opening night, the audience whooped and cheered.

In the second act, called “The Jam,” everyone in the audience is invited onto the stage to dance the Lindy Hop as Vilner and his band play and sing. Vilner even hits the dance floor himself.

A week after closing SW!NG OUT, Teicher spoke over Zoom from their home in New York City about the show and their career in tap and swing dance. The following are lightly edited excerpts from that conversation.

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When you introduced “The Jam” on the opening night of SW!NG OUT, you mentioned it was your favorite part of the show. Why is that?

The simplest way to put it is that I fell in love with dance, not from watching it. I fell in love with dance from doing it. And I’d say most dancers I know would say their favorite thing about being a dancer is not watching other people do it. It’s experiencing it in their own bodies. Of course, several studies show there’s a psychological connection you make when you watch someone do something and it feels as though you’re experiencing it for yourself. But I do think that having people get up and try swing dancing gives them a better understanding of why people have been doing the Lindy Hop for nearly 100 years, because you just have such a good time.

How does social dance influence either your choreography or your performance of Lindy Hop?

Social dancing is improvisational, and that’s just because you meet someone on the dance floor, you ask them to dance or they ask you to dance, and then you start dancing together. But you don’t have choreography, you don’t have a plan for it. The performance I did for many years incorporated improvisation because tap dance and jazz dance and a lot of the other styles that I was working in have historically incorporated improvisation. But as I started to social dance more, and as I did more Lindy Hop, I became more and more convinced that improvisation was a really valuable aspect of live performance. For many years, I thought, improvisation is what you do when you run out of time to choreograph the whole thing or when you just want to give someone some time to do something. Now so much of the composition of SW!NG OUT is resting on improvisation. And I feel like there’s an ideological or philosophical or artistic motive behind that, which is to say, the reason this show has this palpable energy is because it truly is improvisational.

Why did you create the Braintrust for SW!NG OUT?

The offer to do a big swing show came to me because I had created a lot of concert dance work. The other members of the Braintrust had not made as much concert dance work or had not made as much concert dance work that had been seen on the bigger concert dance stages as I had. I said, I really feel like I’m the right person to direct this and oversee the vision of the show, but for it to have the best impact it can, for it to be the clearest statement on what Lindy Hop is and what Lindy Hop could be, what Lindy Hop will continue to be, it really needs a core team of people who all have either been in Lindy Hop longer than I have or just have a really different perspective on it. So I gathered this group of people with that in mind.

Just to shout out three of them. Nathan is my primary swing dance partner, but Nathan has been swing dancing since the ’90s, since he was in high school. You can’t replace that amount of time. Same for Evita Arce, who also has been in the Lindy Hop scene for over 20 years. And Nathan and Evita have been dance partners, but also have had their own experiences. Evita performed in Swing! The Musical, and she used to run a swing dance company that I was in. And then LaTasha Barnes. Her timeline on Lindy Hop is actually very similar to mine. I think she’s been doing it for about a decade, but her perspective is different because she came from the house dance world, the street dance world, the club dance world. Also her perspective as a Black woman is completely different than mine (for obvious reasons). Lindy Hop is a historically Black dance, and we all dialogue with the tradition of this dance while incorporating our own experiences and perspectives. I felt like, at the intersection of our artistic voices, we would make the best Lindy Hop show there was.

Nathan Bugh and LaTasha Barnes in SW!NG OUT

You’ve said previously that you prefer to follow instead of lead. Why?

It’s more fun for me. As a male-bodied person, when I was first taught to swing dance, the assumption was that I was going to lead. When I started (and this is 12 years ago now), I started leading. And then in 2013, a dear friend of mine encouraged me to switch roles more. There was actually a community group called the Double Troubles where basically the whole idea is that they would put together bits of choreography where everyone led and everyone followed, so you’d switch roles throughout the dance, which at the time was not happening a ton in choreography. It was cool. It was to get better. And I just enjoyed following so much.

I would see people of all genders leading and following, but the conversation is much more forward now, and the mixing of gender expression and dance roles seems even more common. The Lindy Hop community has historically been expansive and accepting, but I would say that Lindy Hop continues to expand.

And then again, to come back to Nathan Bugh. My partnership with Nathan is what really got me more into following because when I danced with Nathan, it wasn’t about gender. It was just about when I danced with Nathan, I felt like I should follow, and I felt like he should lead. And part of that was because of his experience in the dance. And part of that was because it just sort of felt right for our bodies as we moved through space together.

I also should say I’ve come to greater clarity about my gender over the past few years. I always felt not really like a man, but not really like a woman. And then at some point, five or six years ago, I was aware that there was terminology that reflected people who didn’t really feel like one or the other. And at first, I thought, Well, that’s good to know, but I don’t really need to address it publicly. I don’t need to make sure people know how I feel within myself. It’s really just a me-towards-me realization or confirmation. And that made me feel a lot better about myself.

But then maybe three or four years ago, I started to describe myself as nonbinary, and started using gender-neutral pronouns. As I started to allow other people to affirm it by using gender-neutral pronouns, it just made a lot more sense. I think it made a lot more sense for a lot of people who have known me my whole life.

I also should say that I think following as a male-bodied person and also being able to switch roles feels right, because when I meet a person, I kind of just negotiate how it makes sense to dance with them.

What drew you to jazz dance and to Lindy Hop?

My connection to dance is from music. I was that kid who was into ’N Sync and Backstreet Boys, and I danced on my bed and choreographed little routines. I was that kid who grew up watching these pop supergroups and dances on MTV. And the first thing I studied was drums. I loved drumming. I loved playing music. I love music. The first dance form I did was tap dance. I fell in love with tap dance. And that makes sense because tap dance interacts with music in an even more direct way than Lindy Hop. Tap dance is a form of percussive music. So I think the line there goes to other forms of dance that are very much rooted in the connection to music (many of which are part of the African American diaspora), and that’s a lot of social dance. But Lindy Hop particularly has a really strong connection to music, to jazz music, to live music. I also think, as a person who is relatively extroverted, who likes people, that Lindy Hop is a dance about socializing and connecting with people. Lindy Hop is the sort of synergy of two things that really move me as a person. One is music, and the other is connecting with other people.

You mentioned you were invited to curate Lindy Hop classes for beginners at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Do you think anyone can learn Lindy Hop?

Yeah, for sure. I think there are limits or levels. Not everyone could or should do a split. Not everyone could or should do eight or 10 turns. But I don’t think the point of dancing is to do a split or to do eight or 10 turns. I think the point of dancing is to feel connected to your body and maybe feel connected to someone else or feel connected to the music. What I love about dance is that it has the capacity to mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

Caleb Teicher and Joshua Mclean in SW!NG OUT

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Caleb Teicher will return to The Joyce Theater in December with their show Bzzz. Described as “a captivating collision of tap dance and beatboxing,” the show will feature a cast of six tap dancers alongside world-champion beatboxers Chris Celiz and Gene Shinozaki.

To learn more, visit www.calebteicher.net.

Bonnie Eissner is the director of communications at The City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and a writer who covers culture, history, politics, and more. You can see samples of her work at visit linktr.ee/bonnie_writing.

The post Spreading the Joy of Swing Dance appeared first on Stance on Dance.

Steven Melendez remembers the first bow he took as a dancer when he was 8. He was living in a homeless shelter and had just danced in the Nutcracker.

“I appreciated the stroking of my ego as taking a bow and having people clap for me,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s a wonderful thing to have adulation and praise and bravos and all that.”

Through LIFT, a program that Diana Byer, founding artistic director of New York Theatre Ballet, started in 1989, Melendez and other housing insecure children received scholarships to the company’s dance school. For Melendez’s mother, a medical researcher raising two kids on her own, the program offered free childcare. For Melendez, the dance recitals gave him access to the stage and the attention he craved, especially in a society that treats people who are homeless as invisible, he said. He leapt from the shadows into the spotlight; by age 14, he started dancing professionally with New York Theatre Ballet.

Last year, at age 36, Melendez became the artistic director of New York Theatre Ballet, stepping into the role that Byer, who brought him to the company, had held since 1978.

And this month, his story is getting a wide airing with the nationwide release of the documentary LIFT. The film has won several awards including an Audience Award at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, and its executive producer and principal advisor is Misty Copeland. The documentary centers on Melendez and three children living in shelters and public housing who join the LIFT program.

In a scene from LIFT, Steven Melendez teaches children at a New York City shelter. Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

One of the kids is Victor Abreu, who started as a LIFT student when he was 10. He is now a member of the New York City Ballet’s corps de ballet.

Abreu’s triumphs and struggles, especially as he hits the turbulence of adolescence, unfold over the course of the film, which took Academy Award–nominated director David Petersen more than 10 years to make.

A young Victor Abreu takes classes at New York Theatre Ballet School. Photo by Heather Weston, courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

The film also portrays the dance and home lives of two other LIFT students — both girls.

Petersen spent so much time with the kids and families that by the end of the process he came to know them, he said. And while he edited out clichés about the neighborhoods where they live — footage of people living on the street or stealing burned out cars — he does portray their hardships. One family’s electricity is cut off due to unpaid bills. A mom loses a job; another mentions the worry of family hunger.

The film, though, revolves around Melendez. It opens when he, as the new director of LIFT, visits the shelter, Seneca Houses, where he lived from ages 7 to 10, to recruit students for the program. As he searches the building for where he and his family stayed, he passes out. “Going back to that shelter for the first time, there’s some trauma,” he reflects in the movie.

During the film, he explores the gut punch of losing his childhood home and how the years of homelessness and housing insecurity colored his life.

“I’d spent quite a bit of time trying to get away from my childhood and my background,” Melendez said, “because I didn’t see how it would serve me. In fact, I saw it often as a detriment. I felt like it was difficult for me to gain accolades or praise for the work that I was doing.”

After starting his career with New York Theatre Ballet, Melendez moved to Argentina to dance as a soloist with Ballet Concierto, then joined the Estonian National Ballet and danced with other companies internationally. “I moved away to prove I could be a dancer,” he says in the film.

When the filming began in 2011, Melendez was 25. “I still saw myself as a classical dancer,” he said, “not as an advocate, not really as a teacher, not as a person who was speaking for people that can’t speak for themselves.”

But over the course of LIFT, Melendez’ perspective shifts. “As the filming process went on,” Melendez said, “I went through a sort of weekly or monthly, for lack of a better word, almost like a therapy session.” He began to think about his childhood and what it meant or didn’t mean, he said.

“Who I am now and the position I’m at now as a director of New York Theatre Ballet and the mission that I have, personally, and the mission of the company has shifted slightly from where it was before,” Melendez said. “I don’t know that it would be if not for the process of going through making this film. It helped me mature in a direction as a person, let alone as an artist, in a way that I don’t know that I was on track for 10 years ago.”

At one point in the film, Melendez reflects on Victor Abreu’s budding career and how it mirrors his own trajectory. “I hope that Victor will be able to use his background and see where he is different from the dancers that have come before him, to see what secret weapon he has, I suppose, to confront the world.”

Steven Melendez (left) guides Victor Abreu at a rehearsal. Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures.

And towards the end of the film, Melendez does just that. He choreographs a dance for the LIFT students about emerging from poverty.

The curtain call for that recital makes Petersen, the director, cry every time he sees his film.

“I’m looking at those kids, and I know where they came from; I know their families. I know where they are now after the film was finished, and I see their eyes, and I see the families crying,” Petersen said. “And I’m crying with them because that adulation, that applause, that sense of self-worth is so powerful and moving to me, and it never gets old. And that’s I think why we made the film — for that moment.”

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LIFT was released in select theaters on September 15th and has been available to rent or buy digitally since September 22nd.

The post A Balm for Kids Experiencing the Pain of Homelessness appeared first on Stance on Dance.

The daylight was fading from the windows of the fifth-floor Manhattan studio as Morgan McEwen, the founding artistic director of MorDance, and seven dancers worked through the steps of the ballet the company would perform in just a few weeks. Late in the rehearsal, McEwen demonstrated some steps she had envisioned, narrating as she went. Something like: arabesque, pirouette, chassé, bird arms.

Bird arms?

With that last term, she hunched her shoulders and extended her arms as if lifting enormous wings. She maintained grace even as she countered the conventions of ballet—curling her back, thrusting her arms out at sharp, avian-like angles.

But McEwen and her dancers were practiced at making bird shapes with their bodies. They had spent a weeklong retreat in Martha’s Vineyard embodying birds, and specifically the albatross—the giant seabirds whose wings can span up to 11 feet.

At the end of April, McEwen will premiere her new dance, simply called Albatross, at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at The City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice (supported by a CUNY Dance Initiative residency). To pull it off, to make an awkward bird beautiful, McEwen and her dancers must stretch the boundaries of ballet. But that’s why McEwen got into choreography in the first place.

From Albatross, Photo by Meredith Lawrence

Ten years ago, while dancing for the Metropolitan Opera ballet, McEwen realized she wanted to do more than dance other people’s dances. She was ready to choreograph her own.

“So often people are asking, ‘Why is ballet an art form where half of the audience is over 50?’” McEwen said. “I think when you’re telling stories that aren’t relatable, you’re alienating a large portion of the audience that would be interested in the art form.”

With just over $12,000 in crowdsourced seed funding, she started her own nonprofit ballet company.

Finding her find her voice, though, took a few years.

“I think, really, I started trying to find that around our fifth season,” she said, “and now I’m all forces blazing.”

Last November, about 100 ballet enthusiasts filled the seats in the Martha Graham Studios in New York to preview Albatross and Emily, a ballet inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poetry that will also premiere in late April. There was little white hair in the audience, and that wasn’t a fluke. The company has attracted students and people under 40 who are interested in its works and can afford the $20 to $30 tickets, McEwen said.

In Albatross, McEwen blends the weightlessness of ballet with gravity-bound elements of modern dance to depict the seabirds who soar and mate amid the looming threat of the plastic-polluted waters from which they feed their young.

The dance is loosely based on Chris Jordan’s eponymous documentary about the albatross colony at Midway Island whose chicks are dying at alarming rates from ingesting plastic debris. McEwen had been seeking art that captured how mass consumption affects the planet, and when she saw Jordan’s film, she knew she had to translate it into a ballet.

In choreographing the dance and collaborating with composer Josh Knowles, she fulfilled the filmmaker’s wish not to devastate audiences but to stir their sympathy and awe for the threatened birds.

Four female dancers en pointe are paired with four males. Albatrosses mate for life, and the dancers alternate between intimate paired dancing and moving together as a flock. The dancers simulate the birds’ years-long flights away from land with outstretched arms, swaying bodies, and, especially for the women dancers, dramatic lifts, and plenty of turns and leaps. Tenderness and innocence tango with melancholy in the piece, which is set to Knowles’ score of looping and distorted violin music. The blend of legato and staccato adds a dystopian air to the work.

From Albatross, Photo by Meredith Lawrence

For the second new dance, Emily, McEwen drew inspiration from Dickinson’s 1862 poem “They Shut Me Up in Prose” about her escape from an intolerant society into her imagination.

“This is a woman that wasn’t heard,” McEwen said. “I look at myself in my early career, and I think as a young dancer, I was never really heard. I was a body in a studio doing what I was told to do.”

The eight-person dance is set to searing music for piano and strings composed by Polina Nazaykinskaya. In a movement that evokes the sentiments of the poem, a dancer playing Emily is pushed, shoved, and kicked by the seven other dancers.

Yet the five-part ballet is not only about a woman artist being stifled. It has evolved into a depiction of a woman growing up and finding her voice. McEwen found inspiration for the different movements, she said, in the life stages and experiences of her mother, grandmother, and her two-year-old daughter.

“The world is her oyster right now,” McEwen said, describing her daughter. “No one is silencing her. She’s just there. She’s so free and unaware. … If we all had it when we were adults, I think it would be truly incredible.”

From Emily, Photo by Meredith Lawrence

McEwen hopes to be a role model for other young women. “I have never had a female boss my entire career,” she said. “I’ve only danced ballets by maybe five women my entire career. I think it’s important for people to see people that look like them in these roles.”

She added, “I think representation is important in all ways.” She wants to attract a young, diverse audience and seeks to mirror that diversity in her dancers. The troupe includes several dancers of color and dancers who identify as queer and non-binary.

McEwen considers ballet a platform for instigating change.

“I think ballet is one of the most incredible art forms there is,” she said. “I think it has the power to tell incredible stories. I think it has the power to educate people. I feel it has the power to unite people.”

Her new works show that a decade into leading her company, she is realizing this vision.

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To learn more, visit www.mordance.org.

The post Breaking the Ballet Mold to Inspire Change appeared first on Stance on Dance.

The Fall/Winter 2024 print issue features the following:

Snowflake Calvert describes Queering Cultural Forms, a program of the Queering Dance Festival that provides a platform where traditional cultural dances are explored and enriched through a queer lens. Julia Allisson Cost details the process of painting a picture book, and how she experienced the process as similar to choreographing. Bonnie Eissner profiles Bobby “Pocket” Horner, a street-dancer turned Broadway star who asks difficult and important questions about the nature of working on Broadway. Erin Malley shares the ways in which the Argentine tango world is in flux after the pandemic. Jessie Nowak reflects on the agony of artmaking as she created the sci-fi dance film Emerging. And Donna Schoenherr makes the point for better aging in dance opportunities through her work at Ballet4Life and the nonprofit Move into Wellbeing®.

Additionally, Emmaly Wiederholt interviewed Zazel-Chavah O’Garra, director of ZCO/Dance Project, about how her brain tumor surgery catalyzed her passion for integrating dancers with disabilities, and Vicky Holt Takamine, master hula teacher of Pua Aliʻi ʻIlima and the executive director of PAʻI Foundation, about how she is working to preserve and perpetuate native Hawaiian arts and cultural traditions for future generations. Finally, visual artist Erica Wilson renders raw and surrealist moments in dance in her quest to capture gesture and flow.

If you donate $25 or more to support dance journalism, you will receive two issues of Stance on Dance’s print publication. Stance on Dance is a 501c3 and your donation is tax-deductible.

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Stance on Dance sends free copies of our twice-a-year print publication to college dance programs and other dance learning spaces. To date, we have partnered with dance faculty at Antioch University New England, Arizona State University, A:shiwi College, Austin Community College, Bennington College, California State University East Bay, California State University Long Beach, Colorado State University, Cuyahoga Community College, Davidson College, Florida International University, Keene State College, Kent State University, Loyola University Chicago, Old Dominion University, Ohio State University, Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, Skidmore College, Sonoma State University, Texas Christian University, Texas State University, Texas Tech University, University of Akron, University of Arizona, University of California Irvine, University of California San Diego, University of Florida, University of Illinois Chicago, University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign, University of Kansas, University of Maryland, University of Nevada, Reno, University of New Mexico, University of Richmond, University of San Francisco, University of Silicon Andhra, University of South Florida, University of Southern Mississippi, University of Utah, University of Washington, and Utah Valley University. If you work in a dance department or other dance learning spaces and would like to learn more about this program, email emmaly@stanceondance.com.

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