Dakshina, The Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company, brought its dramatic signature work “Vasanth” and three mood pieces to the new (10/10/2010) Artisphere. “Vasanth” tells of the death and rebirth of Love and of Spring’s return to this world. It has runs for the corps that swirl swiftly about the stage, pantomimic action with a poignant appeal, sensuality plus a feast of joyous foot patter. A mixed cast of familiar and new performers (including Graham Pitts as Love, Shailaja Maru as Spring, Singh as the entranced/awakened great god Shiva, Madhvi Venkatesh as Desire, and Stacey Yvonne Claytor as Shiva’s consort) gave a very fresh performance of Singh’s melding of Indiadance, modern dance and ballet.

The three other works went well together. One was a thoughtful love dance for two men, “Since You’ve Asked” by Singh. He and Jamal Ari Black gave it nobility. In “By the Light…”, the late Eric Hampton visualized Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” as a woman’s solo of sorrow. She looks up into the light of the moon, she leans back in the moonbeams as if to remember, she grieves and, briefly, succeeds in conjuring up her lost love. This is a solo more than it is a duo, one of intensity and utter simplicity. Natalia Pinzon honed it to perfection. As her ghostly partner, Black was present for an instant and then not. The last formal piece on the program, Ludovic Jolivet’s “Voy y Vengo”, is for 6 dancers (only 5 were listed in the program) seated on roller chairs. Jolivet transformed the people and chairs into a congregation. Its members bowed and straightened, they held up their arms and folded them, they took hold of others’ hands and let go while unobtrusively pedaling their chairs over and around the stage space. They moved on smooth paths and in simple formations to music by Franz Schubert, Yann Tiersen and Jolivet himself. This roller dance could have been shorter but by no means was it a gimmick. Concluding the program was a dance party in Artisphere’s ballroom . (December 11, 2011 in the Black Box Theater of Arlington, Virginia’s Artisphere.)

What drew you to Dakshina?

Donald with visiting artist Alarmel Valli

And what keeps you coming back?

Three things: Daniel’s insistence that his work include social awareness; the concept that dance does not (and cannot) exist apart from all of the other arts; and, the fact that the Company is like an extension of family for all of its members.

What is your most treasured story of a visiting artist you met?

This is absolutely NOT a fair question as I have treasured memories from each of our guest artists. While I understand that each of them is a world class artist, I interact with them, and view them, as a new friend that I am hosting in my city.

Runners-up: Being the lunch guest of VP & Shanta Dhananjayan with Daniel at the Yogaville ashram; being invited to share the afternoon meal with Mallika Sarabhai and her dancers last fall; being invited to share rehearsal with only Lorry May, Melissa Greco Liu and Daniel.

However, you said “story”, so here is the winner:
During the 2009 Fall Festival, I was fortunate to spend a great deal of time with Madhavi Mudgal and her niece Arushi. As the guests were arriving for Leela Samson’s Saturday night performance, I met Alif Laila, who is a great friend of the Company, also my personal friend and an extraordinary sitar artist. Knowing I was watching over our guest artists, she asked about meeting them. I assured her I would introduce her to Leela after the performance. I added that Madhavi was coming to the performance to see her friend Leela and I would make sure she met her for a few private words. Alif asked, “Madhavi? Do you mean Madhavi Mudgal? You know her? Donald, she is like a goddess to me!” So, at intermission, I walked Alif Laila to meet her goddess, Madhavi Mudgal. The joy in Alif’s face – that I will never forget.

What one thing would you tell prospective volunteers?

This is very easy. Friends always ask, hey what did you do yesterday, last week, this past weekend. After a few Dakshina events – sitar, spoken word, backstage at the Lincoln Theater, rehearsals, – your friends will say: “Wow. You have a very interesting life”.

Have you considered volunteering with Dakshina? You’ll get the satisfaction of making dance a central part of the art scene in DC, and you’ll get to meet world class artists through out the year. There are several ways in which you can get involved. Please consider

1. Joining our board
2. Volunteering with us for special projects
3. Interning with us–you can even earn course credit

Feel free to email us with questions at info@dakshina.org.

Read the review by Pamela Squires on our performance featuring Anna Sokolow’s iconic pieces at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

Dance View Times Review (11-7-10)

Read the review by George Jackson, a much respected veteran dance critic who writes in several local, national, and international mediums.

Washington Post Feature by chief critic Sarah Kaufman (10-31-10)

Sarah Kaufman, the Post’s Pulitzer prize winning chief dance critic features Dakshina’s exponential growth in the last few years and talks about the upcoming performances at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. Read full article here.

Metro Weekly Features Dakshina (11-4-10)

Metro Weekly, one of DC’s leading LGBT community papers features Dakshina. Read full article here.

Another Dakshina First: WMUC interviews Daniel Phoenix Singh on their Radio Program (11-2-10)

This is the first time the student run radio station at the University of Maryland has ever interviewed a guest artist for their show. Listen to the full interview here.

Dance View Times review of our Fall Festival (10-08-10)

Veteran dance critic George Jackson reviews our featured artist Mallika Sarabhai’s performance at the Lincoln Theatre. Read full article here.

By Sarah Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 31, 2010

It is a deceptively simple picture: Daniel Phoenix Singh sits in a wooden chair, hands on his lap, staring straight ahead. He’s one of nine dancers in this studio at Silver Spring’s Maryland Youth Ballet, all of them seated the same rigid way, as if they have been plotted on graph paper and are captive to an unyielding calculus.

Slowly, on the same silent count, Singh and the others lean forward, making a focused appeal to the wall they’re facing.

The dancers are members of Singh’s company, Dakshina. Karen Bernstein, one of two rehearsal directors watching their run-through of the opening moments of Anna Sokolow’s “Rooms,” stops them. In this 1955 work that distills the alienation of apartment-dwellers, that forward pitch in their posture is a pleading gesture to the audience, Bernstein tells them, “like, ‘Help me — I have something important to say.’ ” The dancers scooch back against their chairs and repeat their mute entreaty, making it a little gentler around the eyes, a little more poignant.

Simple enough. Though for Singh, 38, getting to this point has been anything but easy. To this soft-spoken man whose Indian birth certificate is stamped “backward class” as a signifier of his low caste, to this onetime misfit who would be trapped in techie geekdom if he hadn’t discovered dance at the University of Maryland — to Singh, this studio, these chairs, the specificity of Sokolow’s work: This is what freedom looks like.

After a few years of dancing works by Sokolow, a pioneer in American modern dance who died in 2000, Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh will perform two all-Sokolow programs — including “Rooms,” her most famous piece, with each chair representing an isolated flat; “Dreams,” a searing meditation on the Holocaust; and reconstructions of her little-known “Frida,” based on the life of painter Frida Kahlo, and the love duet “September Sonnet.” Performances are Thursday and Friday at the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

These shows won’t be the end of Singh’s Sokolow obsession. With the help of Lorry May, one of Sokolow’s leading dancers, who now licenses her choreography (mostly to colleges and small regional groups), Singh hopes to acquire Sokolow’s existing catalogue, some 30 works.

As it is, Singh’s two rehearsal directors, Bernstein and Harriet Moncure Williams, are compiling written notations of the Sokolow works that May has taught the company — a remarkable act of preservation.

Why is Singh taking this on? How did this Indian immigrant become enmeshed in the biting social commentary of a leftist Jewish woman? As a founding member of the Actors Studio, Sokolow taught movement to such stage and screen stars as Julie Harris and Eli Wallach. But in the centennial of her birth, her dances can be seen only spottily. (As an example of how prominent Sokolow once was in the New York arts scene, she was the original choreographer for the 1967 off-Broadway run of “Hair” — the showcase that launched the anthemic musical into enduring popularity, as witnessed by its current sojourn at the Kennedy Center. But that kind of success was not to be Sokolow’s. She was fired just before the show opened.)

Singh first saw one of Sokolow’s pieces at Dance Place 12 years ago — it was her 1945 solo “Kaddish,” performed by Risa Steinberg, a veteran interpreter of Sokolow’s work. At just five minutes long, it is a sustained gasp of mourning, in which the dancer wraps herself in her arms, beats her chest and plunges to the floor, then drifts away into the shadows. Brief as it was, it spoke to Singh.

“It’s all about the hands,” he says, spooning stewed lentils over a mound of rice at Heritage India near Dupont Circle. He demonstrates a few gestures from the solo, reaching across the table with long fingers, then cradling his face in his palms. “It was kind of a cultural trigger for me. I don’t know what it was about it, but I felt this powerful longing and pain in her.”

And there was something else. “I have seen my mother beat her chest in mourning,” he says. “It’s an Indian thing, a really physical slap. It’s an image you don’t forget easily; it still makes me lose my breath when I think about it. To see it from a different cultural perspective — it triggered something.”

But there is more than sentimentality behind the story of Singh’s connection with the volatile expressionism of this pre- “Mad Men”-era artist. There is something pure about it. This is the story of art bridging cultural divides, time and mortality. And–at the risk of sounding like another type of chest-beater–it could only happen here.

* * *

Anna Sokolow grew up on New York’s Lower East Side, the daughter of Russian immigrants. She danced with Martha Graham in the 1930s before making her own works that expressed human pain and fortitude in powerful new ways — often with screams, explosive agitation and frozen moments of watchfulness. She drew inspiration from city life, its energy as well as its confinement; she channeled the agonies of the Holocaust and the arts of Mexico, where she frequently worked. Companies as diverse as the Joffrey Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company have performed her work.

Yet even before her death at 90, Sokolow had been steadily fading from public view. An influential teacher who inspired such choreographers as Jerome Robbins and Martha Clarke, she had never founded a dance school or maintained a studio, and there was little funding to keep her on-again, off-again troupe, the Players’ Project, in business.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, dance held a secret fascination for Singh, but it had to remain just that — a secret. The youngest of three children, he was raised in Mumbai and Chennai in a financially strapped, strict Methodist family near the bottom of India’s rigid social structure. Daniel, his brother, David, and sister, Tara, attended religious schools and were kept away from things considered non-Christian. That included classical Indian dance forms such as bharatanatyam, the sensual, highly theatrical form grounded in Hindu mythology, which Singh knew about only from Bollywood films.

His life had one thrust, drilled into him by his parents, who saw a high-tech career as the only way to a better life: “I have to succeed, I have to succeed, I have to succeed.” Recalling the mantra now, Singh grips his head in his hands.

After Singh’s sister married an Indian American and moved to Maryland, she brought her parents over, and they, in turn, brought over Singh and his brother in 1990. A few years later, as Singh was nearing graduation from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, as a computer science major, he realized he lacked a physical education credit. He signed up for a ballet class. And discovered and lost his heart in almost the same moment.

The physicality was a rush. In India, he says with a shy smile, “I was nerdy.” (Nerdier than the other techie kids? He considers. Well, he says, “I wasn’t out there playing cricket.”) With his lean athletic build, Singh looks far from nerdy now. He’s fashionably urbane, wearing a crisp deep purple shirt and dark trousers, his black hair neatly parted and slicked straight. A few curls have sprung free, charmingly, around his ears.

Through dance, Singh says, “I found comfort in my body. I didn’t have to articulate in words.”

And he couldn’t get enough of it. He studied the modern-dance techniques of Graham, Merce Cunningham and Jose Limon. He was working as a janitor at Rockville High School when one night there was a bharatanatyam concert in the auditorium, by a Gaithersburg-based troupe called Nrityanjali. For the first time, Singh saw a live performance of one of the oldest dances of his homeland. Soon after, he persuaded Nrityanjali director Meena Telikacherla to take him on as a student.

“I had to really start from scratch,” Telikacherla says. “But his wanting to learn — that impressed me. And he had the discipline to come on a regular basis.”

Singh wanted to crack the code of this complicated dance form, whose clarity “was breathtaking to watch,” he says. But he could hardly have chosen a more difficult art to begin at the late age of 23. In bharatanatyam, the dancer must be deeply expressive — communicating a story and emotions with the body as well as the face — while moving to highly complex rhythms: The hands, fingers and even the eyes respond to specific musical counts as the feet pound out a beat of their own.

Singh’s family wasn’t pleased by this cultural connection, he says. As Christians, they were appalled that he was throwing himself into a form of dance with origins in Hindu temple rituals. Then came another shock: Having found a supportive community of artists here, and having rejected his fundamentalist upbringing, Singh came out as a gay man.

Since then, neither his brother, a Methodist minister, nor his sister has had much contact with him. His mother, Singh says, tried “to pray me straight.” She fasted. She lamented that it was all her fault, that if only his father, who had recently died, were still alive “this wouldn’t have happened.”

* * *

It was around this time that Singh saw Sokolow’s “Kaddish.”

The title refers to the Hebrew prayer of mourning. Sokolow had created it in 1945, with the Holocaust and her father’s death on her mind. When Singh saw it, after losing his father, to whom he’d never been able to reveal what was truest about himself — his homosexuality, his love of dance — the performance unleashed the grief he’d been keeping inside. In Sokolow’s work, he realized, the dancer is not merely form or motion, as she is in so much of contemporary dance. She is a person, a real person with feelings like his.

Discovering the living humanity in Sokolow’s work, created half a century before and a world away from Singh, was like finding the last piece of a puzzle. Now he knew what he wanted to do with his life: run a dance company that brought together modern dance — particularly Sokolow’s brand — and bharatanatyam.

“Dance helped me put all these pieces of myself — being Indian and being gay and being an immigrant — together,” Singh says. “It’s a place where you can be all of yourself and not divide yourself.”

Luckily, his nerdy side meant that Singh was better equipped to float this improbable dream than most. For the past 13 years he has worked for the Association of American Colleges and Universities, where he is director of information systems. He owns a house. He has job security.

“Yeah, if I don’t get outsourced — to India,” he cracks.

He founded Dakshina, which means “offering” in Sanskrit, in 2004, after getting a master’s in fine arts from the University of Maryland in College Park in dance, performance and choreography.

In some ways, he’s more stereotypically Indian now than he was when he was growing up in India. He has become a vegetarian, and he teaches yoga. His choreography for Dakshina fuses bharatanatyam with modern dance. And once a year he hosts an Indian dance festival at the Lincoln Theatre, bringing over prominent dancers from India. Among them is Mallika Sarabhai, a dancer so celebrated that when I had lunch with her and Singh at an Indian restaurant here some time ago, the wait staff asked to pose with her for photos.

“He’s genuinely trying to find a new language, and doing it with a mixed company and doing it in a way that I find really interesting and not just superficial,” says Sarabhai, who performed at this year’s festival on Oct. 8. “I think it comes out of very deep thought.” As for Singh’s interest in Sokolow, Sarabhai reasons that “the raw emotion is something that is very Indian. None of the Indian arts is stony-faced and abstract, in that sense.”

Working with a modest annual budget of less than $250,000, Singh has built Dakshina into a busy operation with a growing presence both here and internationally. He has taken Sokolow’s work to Bangladesh and India. He has performances booked around here through July, including at the Kennedy Center’s Maximum India festival in March. Next month, he takes his company to Argentina for the Queer Tango Festival in Buenos Aires.

He performs every year at Dance Place, where he had his Sokolow epiphany.

And he calls his mother every day, even though she doesn’t come to his performances.

His analytical background gives him a realistic view of his future; he is prepared to run Dakshina at a loss for several more years. “I have a lot of dance friends who quit their day jobs and moved to New York, and now they’re waiting tables,” he says. “So I’m holding on to my job.”

But Singh says he’ll never give up dancing. Like the characters in Sokolow’s “Rooms,” he has something important to say.

“It’s a big journey,” he says. “I feel like I’ve just started.”

Buy tickets at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center website.

An Evening of Anna Sokolow performed by Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company. Nov. 4 and 5 at 8 p.m. at Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, University of Maryland. Tickets $30.

Richard Morgan explores when it stopped being an embarrassment to say you live in D.C. and interviews a group of the capital’s most influential gays to shine a light on Washington DC’s rise to hotness. Singh knew DC was cool long before OUT discovered this of course, that’s why we he chose the nation’s Capital for Dakshina’s home.

Read the full article here.

In Nube Blanco (white cloud), Ochoa takes up the theme of “zapateo” (rhythmic footwork) synonymous with Flamenco and creates an interesting juxtaposition by combining it with modern dance’s line, and use of space. The piece begins with a single male dancer on stage, clad in black with blood red shoes that draw your eyes to the feet even before the first percussive note is struck. As the opening solo develops, other dancers enter the stage, with the men and women in all black with red shoes. The women’s skirts have a white ruffle underskirt that is airy and shows off the movements beautifully. Diana Ruettiger costume design works wonderful with Ochoa’s movement, which is expansive, percussive and earthy, and the dancers own the work and space wonderfully.

Ochoa draws on the vibrant use of arms, hand gestures, clapping and stamping of flamenco for this piece and marries it to interesting group work, and theatrics. She uses the shoes, shirts, and skirts as clever props–dancers get in and out of their clothes and shoes throughout the piece offering us humor but often also portraying their beautiful vulnerability. The bare-chested men use their shirts as a matador’s cape while evoking scenes from a bull fight, and the women’s shiny red high-heeled shoes slice through the air glinting like horns. The dancers vocalize throughout the dance, sometimes speaking, sometimes creating sound scores using whistles, and abstract sounds. Towards the end, the dancers come in stripped down to their underwear with just one shoe on. The height difference caused by the missing shoe creates a loping walk that is labored, poignant and funny at the same time. The staccato sound of their clacking heels adds to the image of a group that is weighted down and staggering. Against this background, one of the dancers enters clad in layers and layers of the white ruffle underskirts, bouncing through the stage like a cloud—the counterpoint creates a stunning effect. The group shuffles through space and twitches and shakes, and in the ending image a wall of dancers slowly collapse and roll of the stage, leaving just the namesake white cloud visible on stage.

Ochoa has a strong vision and uses it effectively throughout the piece all the way till the dramatic ending. Unfortunately, instead of relying on her strong dance sections, she introduces several incongruous comic elements in between the dance sections as transitions. I found them mostly distracting and the fact that they occurred only as transitions and were never fully integrated into the piece reinforced that they were unnecessary to the already strong dance. But that is a tiny quibble in an otherwise strong dance.

The much talked about Danzon was the second dance of the evening, live music always creates new energy for the dancers to feed off of, and this was no exception. Vilaro’s program notes says that he created this piece from his memories of the Cuban Danzon, a formal social dance where couples follow a set of codes on when, how and what they do on the dance floor. Typical Cuban Danzons have built in musical preludes for the couples to walk through the dance floor and greet each other and talk to each other. There is a clear musical transition that signals the start of the dance when everyone pairs up and begins the formal dance portion and there is a harkening back to bygone days of grand old ballrooms. And often there is debate about whether the current version was a mockery of the colonists by the locals or if it is just took on its own form.

Vilaro is a master at blending different genres, and we see ballet, modern, and hints of Salsa and Son mixed in fluidly. The dancers eat up the space and riff off the musicians wonderfully. Paquito D‘Rivera’s playing is infectious and the way the music bubbles out of his saxophone makes you want to just giggle for no reason. But the idea that this was a collaboration beyond having the musicians on stage is a stretch to put it mildly. Abstraction is a slippery slope, particularly when the new version becomes an exercise unto itself. Vilaro’s version of the Danzon is so abstracted that it doesn’t bear any resemblance to the original social form in which people promenade, chat, and socialize on the dance floor as much as they dance.

The evening closed with Vilaro’s Quinceañera, his clever take on the popular Latin American custom of the birthday festivities of a girl turning 15. We see young women confused by the impending rush and doom of adulthood and all of its accompanying pleasures and trials. A section on girls trying to walk in high heels is side-splittingly funny, while it also draws attention to the fact that it is still a teenager who is trying to fill an adult’s shoes. We see snapshots of all the characters that make up your average teenage social. In one section, we see the young men at the party trying to impress the girls with their bravado and awkwardness all at once. There is the couple that has imbibed too freely of the wine, the girl who is left alone when everyone else pairs off for the dance and the life of the party who people can’t get enough of. In this quick and wonderful sketch, Vilaro takes us smoothly through the highs and lows of a young woman coming of age, of her joys, fears, awkwardness, and finally, to her transformation from a gawky teenager into a confident adult. And just as seamlessly, Vilaro’s vocabulary moves in and out of genres like ballet, jazz, modern and hints of Latin social dance forms. The focus though is primarily on modern dance, and less so on regional Latin American forms. Whether that approach is a loss or advantage is debatable but it is definitely a feather in Vilaro’s cap that he can make it all fit together so smoothly.

Daniel is a Finalist in the Innovation in the Arts Category for DC’s 25th Annual Mayor’s Arts Awards. As you may know Dakshina means “offering” in Sanskrit and in keeping with this spirit, Dakshina offers artists and communities the unique opportunity to experience dance as a movement that links the arts, cultures, and social causes. Finalists were chosen by the Mayor’s Arts Awards Advisory Jury comprised of prominent members of the District’s arts community with expertise in dance, music, theater, literary arts, visual arts and arts education.

The Mayor’s Arts Awards is the highest honor conferred by the District of Columbia in recognition of artistic excellence and service among artists, arts organizations, and arts patrons in the city. The 33 finalists for the 25th Annual Mayor’s Arts Awards demonstrate the wide range of talent the arts community offers in the District of Columbia.

Washington’s arts community is integral to the world-class city we call home. This year the panel received a record 102 nominations, reinforcing the fact that the Mayor’s Arts Awards represents its appreciation of the contributions made to the rich cultural vitality of Washington DC.

See the full list of Finalists here.

Here are some highlights of our awards in recent years

• Dakshina’s May 2010 Dance Place Show was selected as the critic’s pick by the Washington Post chief critic Sarah Kaufman. One of two local companies to make this distinguished roster. January 2010
• Dakshina’s May Dance Place Show was chosen as the Number One pick of five events by Arion Berger in the Express Daily. 2009
• Emerging Group, for Bell Song, Singh’s fusion work incorporating Bharata Natyam and Modern Dance. Dance Metro DC. 2008
• Excellence in Costume Design (shared with Roxann Morgan) for Bell Song, Singh’s fusion work incorporating Bharata Natyam and Modern Dance., Dance Metro DC. 2008
• Dakshina’s May Dance Place Show was chosen as the Best Pick by Nick Green in the Washington City Paper. 2008.
• Founder’s Award for Innovation in Dance, Dance Metro DC. 2007
• Singh was selected for the Asia-21 Young Leaders Forum. 2007
• Finalist, Emerging Artist–Mayor’s Arts Awards. 2007 and 2006
• Dakshina’s National Geographic Show was chosen as the Best Pick by the Express daily paper. 2005
• Finalist, Set Design for Songs of My Life, Dance Metro DC. 2005
• Songs of My Life selected as Best Pick by Sarah Godfrey in the Washington City Paper. 2004
• Singh became the first Alumnus to be invited to present a program at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland. 2004

Times of India, January 5th, 2010

Performance Date: December 29th, 2009 at Darpana, Ahmedabad.

Taste and clarity of expression within parameters of high aesthetic standards set Dakshina from Washington DC apart as a dance company exploring communication through choreographed movement, powerfully highlighted with dominantly expressive silence and complementing sparse creative music. Its gifted young director Daniel anchors talents of varying cultural origin and, himself a Bharatanatyam dancer, absorbs influences in his work.

One rarely comes across a pleasing blend of movements – drawn from Indian classical and contemporary dance – seen in the invocatory item “Bell Song”, elegantly performed by radiant dancers in white with red relief, at the 34th Vikram Sarabhai International Arts Festival. Stacey and Stephanie’s “Lullaby”, choreographed on Puccini’s aria ‘O my babbino caro’ in Italian, is touching in its simplicity and affirms the power of love.

In the lyrical gem “Since You’ve Asked”, Melissa and Jamal delicately recalling ‘all the songs’ and how ‘time turned to flowers’, portray the resolve of a young couple to hold on together even in adversity. “Devaki” is fresh with an original interpretation through individual expression (Stacey) and group choreography. Devaki laments the loss of her children, of bestowing love on child Krishna and remaining in oblivion. It is against this backdrop that, on the famous Jayadev shloka ‘Kuru Yadunandana’, in which Radha invites Krishna to do a leaf design on her bosom with deer musk that Krishna’s ‘shringara leela’ leading to ecstasy, is portrayed.

Devotion, love, togetherness, ‘shringara’ and sorrow lead to pain through atrocity in the Holocaust or War in the piece de resistance on the second day at InterART in Dakshina’s eight-segment ‘Dreams’, originally choreographed by Anna Sokolow, Israel-born American, a pioneer of modern dance, who was outraged at the inhuman treatment of humans by humans and had their dignity at heart.

Nightmarish images of anguished faces – of a woman completely insecure without exit, a couple clinging to each other and memories, a man trying to flee and getting caught, pretty faces entrapped and played with, a child’s soothing hand on the insecure woman’s head, a man losing hope and collapsing, a couple unwilling to separate and finally the end of them all through suffocation in the cell. Projected without words, to expressive music and creative light designs the images numb, haunt and make you think.
—-Suresh D Desai

Make Art! Change the World! Starve!: The Fallacy of Art as Social Justice – Part I

by Yasmin Nair

Change, Change, Change

Art has never been too far away from social justice. Artists have, accurately or not, been considered the radical visionaries of society. In recent years, the concept of art as social justice has become prominent in the non-profit and organizing worlds. Everywhere you turn, it seems, there is a mural about community or a hip hop performance about racial harmony. Art is no longer merely to be seen and consumed; it has now become a conscious mechanism in the resistance to neoliberalism, the intense privatization of everyday life that has brought us to this current economic disaster.

I am a writer and activist. My projects focus on issues like comprehensive immigration reform, which I support and the privatization of the public school system, which I oppose. A significant part of my writing appears in left/progressive publications devoted to social justice. A life like mine, which combines my art with social justice, might well be considered the best response to the injustice that pervades the world.

That is one way of looking at it. The truth is the opposite. I am, in fact, neoliberalism’s wet dream come true.

I contend that our current obsession with the amalgamation of art and social justice is no resistance to neoliberalism but a key component of it.

How could this be, you might ask? Surely, you might wonder, there is nothing like the blending of art and social justice to prove that the artist is working consciously to alleviate current conditions of economic and cultural inequality.

Well.

In “Against Diversity,” the critic Walter Benn Michaels provides us with the crucial distinction between a neoliberalism of the left and a neoliberalism of the right. Michaels illuminates this in the context of the relentless emphasis on racial and cultural diversity, long considered a panacea for all social ills in the United States, but his distinction is immensely useful in taking apart the notion of art as social justice. As he puts it, we might imagine that the desire to prioritize diversity in the workplace is an important step towards eradicating inequality but it in fact contributes to it by making diversity rather than the eradication of economic inequality the solution for our troubles. Left neoliberals “think that fighting against racial and sexual inequality is at least a step in the direction of real equality” while right neoliberals think “inequality is fine as long as it is not a function of discrimination.” In other words, both sides are neoliberal to the core, but our blindness towards inequality persuades us that only those who oppose diversity outright are the neoliberals we need to worry about.

That distinction between left and right neoliberals is key when it comes to the world of the arts in the United States, where the culture wars have given us easy distinctions between the left and the right. Here, neoliberals who would crush the freedom of self-expression are seen as poised on the right against freethinking and brave artistic souls constructing radical political work, whom we perceive as positioned on the left. In this milieu, private or foundation funders of art projects with a social justice emphasis are seen as coming to the rescue of “the arts” and helping to create conditions that foster a better society.

The idea that art is part of a larger cultural project of social justice is not entirely new to the United States, which has a history of deeming art as worthless if it is not Good for You. A sequel to this piece will go into detail about key moments in the intertwining of art and social justice. For now, it will suffice to note that much of this relatively recent heightened attention is a result of the infamous NEA battles of the 1980s and 1990s, most famously around the works of artists like Karen Finley, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Andres Serrano. The attempts to censor these artists were rightly recognized and criticized as such by the arts community, but one unfortunate result has been that the production and evaluation of “Art” has since then been firmly entrenched within the struggle between two sides. As a result, our conception of art’s place in the public sphere has, inevitably, to do with how we respond to the controversies engendered by the resulting controversies.

In this context, the neoliberals of the left are those who would press artists to continue to work for “social justice” and, perhaps, to fight against censorship. The neoliberals on the right are those who think that social justice is not a function of art. Both kinds of neoliberals want control over the production of art, and neither cares much about repaying artists for their labor, and in that they are neoliberal to the core. In the new and exploitative world of art as social justice, we are all neoliberals now.

The notion that art and social justice are intertwined has spread to all levels of the art and funding world, but it manifests itself most clearly in various “public art” projects that take upon themselves the responsibility to not only make art but also heal entire communities. Recently, the Artivist Coalition of San Francisco launched 16 days of events on November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence toward Women and Girls. The day’s events included a speech by Mayor Gavin Newsom, who had declared the 25th the day of commemoration in 2008. According to a piece in the San Francisco Examiner, the 16 days would include performances by artists like “Judy Grahn, choreographer Anne Bluethenthal, musician Diana Gameros, and Aztec Dancers Mixcoatl, among other community artists.” In the same article, songwriter Mamacoatl, who organized the events, is praised for her contributions to the project:

“She remains clear about the integrity of the art. All artists volunteer their time. By relying on the passion that is the driving force, and not on the commercial benefits, Mamacoatl is “confident that something positive can happen.” There is no space here for the “plastic art” which can potentially taint work dependent on grants. Instead, what arises is “a harnessing of creativity,” a gift, through art, to the community. To incite, to inspire, to provoke awareness.”

Here, “harnessing of creativity” becomes un-plastic and ethereal, born of wishes and hopes, adding to the pretense that what the artists produce – their grueling routines, their meticulously choreographed dances, their hours of work put into poetry making, their writing, is worth nothing in material terms.

Therein lies another problem: The notion that the production of art is separate from the nitty-gritty of art as labor. While I would never blame artists themselves for their woes in terms of getting paid, the truth is that many of us have a hard time seeing ourselves as laborers who ought to be fairly compensated. Most of us have been trained to think our work is sacrosanct, that our work is not labor, that it is above petty commerce, and that we must make art only for nobler causes. When you add on the patina of social justice, many of us are reluctant to or unable to negotiate with those who are supposed to pay us, in part because we do care about the issues and the people affected by them. And, in part, because, frankly, too many of us have assimilated a deeply privatized notion that our art is so profound that it can and should directly effect social change – monetary value be damned. The result, as Andrew Ross puts it in a seminal essay, “The Mental Labor Problem,” is that “…the new profile of the artist as a social-service worker is coming to supplant the autonomous avant-garde innovator as a fundable type, increasingly sponsored through local arts agencies.” In the case of the Artivist Coalition events, artists were deployed as semi-mystical healers, responsible for shining a light on matters that should be the purview of social workers and politicians.

My Life in Art

What do funders have to gain from this peculiar commingling of art and social justice? I once found myself in conversation with a woman who was keen to begin financing social justice art projects, and I asked her if the emphasis on private funding would not end up taking pressure off the state to fund the arts. Foolishly, I had assumed that people like her, who talked endlessly about the role of art in the public sphere, actually thought that at least some of the onus for arts funding needed to shift back to the state. After all, if we in the arts are to insist that our work is part of a larger cultural and political framework, we ought also to ask the state to take responsibility for it, and to do so without getting bogged down in the right-wing Jesse Helms-dictated fear mongering of the 1980s. To my surprise, she snipped that the responsibility lay entirely with private funders like her and that there was really no need for the state to play a role at all.

That was when it occurred to me that the woman was a perfect neoliberal of the left, concerned only with perpetuating the very model of privatized funding that has caused our economic crisis in the first place. For the most part, arts and social justice funding is infused with the aura of nobility, combining the portrait of the penniless but determined artist with the desire and drive to change the world. Alongside this figure stands the benign (neo)liberal funder, supposedly concerned only with making the world a better place. But the emphasis on social justice and arts funding does not simply come out of a new urge on the part of people to change the world; it is symptomatic of a crush in arts funding where only art that can evoke a “social justice” model can and – the logic goes – should be funded. This is largely a measure of economic stringency. Fund Arts! Change the world! Cut costs!

No one seems to have asked artists what it means to provide art for social justice. Looking in from the outside, it might appear that artists are naturally drawn to social justice because it is part of their DNA. But is it, really? Who ultimately benefits from this blending of art and social justice? Looking at the lives of writers, it becomes clear that art as social justice is simply part of the neoliberal model of exploitation.

Writing is the probably the most devalued form of artistic creation in the United States. A graphic artist can produce something suitable for framing, a dancer’s motions make dexterity and craft amply clear, a singer has a song. All these arts have settings that highlight the end product. Writing is largely a solitary act, no matter what the proliferation of blogs tells you. At the end of the day, your writing is between you and the flicker of the computer screen, and if you are fortunate to have a writing community of fellow writers, it is between you and them as well. But the primary work, the hard work of producing and creating a legible piece with an argument and an arc (as opposed to a blog that can be shot off without a backward glance) is yours alone. What emerges at the end of the hours of work is sometimes printed on the page, often, these days, digitized for public viewing on the web. There is no way for me to convey to you the hours of writing, research, and rewriting (as well as the hours put in by other writers who took the time to provide input) that this piece alone took. Yet, writing is profoundly devalued to the point where it is seen as work without labor – anyone can write, the argument goes. Just build a website, and pound away.

To be clear, I think it is always a good thing if people want to write more. The problem is that the apparent democratization of writing today comes along with a profound devaluing of its worth as labor that ought to be fairly compensated. Take, for example, the notion of the “citizen journalist.” Someone once had the bright idea that all it takes for a robust and civil society is to turn a group of citizens, armed with little more than basic web access and digital cameras and the ability to pound keys, to make society accountable for its ills. In return, they usually get little more than a free byline. So, what the term “citizen journalist” should really refer to is “unpaid schmuck who will work for free in hopes of a byline.” I also happen to be a professional journalist. I once covered an event and got some exclusive photos as well. When I returned home to file the story, I found that a local website had already “reported” on it. The citizen journalist in question had simply cut and pasted a press release from one of the organizing groups, without even acknowledging that the words were taken verbatim from the document. A reader who assumed that the reporter actually talked to people at the event was unlikely to see the inherent bias in the article. As as activist who has written a fair number of press releases, I know that they are always written ahead of time, regardless of what might actually transpire at an event, and about the careful crafting and messaging that goes into projecting events as spectacular successes. Without important information about the source of the material being divulged to the reader, the “citizen journalist” was able to pass off a cut-and-paste job as journalism. In the end, this is what brings down the quality as well as the expectations of what good journalism should be and it makes the work of journalists look like something that requires no effort and, hence, something that can be done for free or very little.

Let me be fair: I am also a blogger, and that work is entirely for free (a fact that escapes the notice of irate readers who summarily call for my “firing” by editors who are themselves making just enough to keep the sites up and running). I understand the value of producing work that might entice and create a reader base for my writing. But all of this goes on in a social and political environment where people assume that it is not only okay to underpay writers, but that writers should, if worth their salt, be willing to be exploited. A number of my friends write for print magazines and newspapers, and you would think that they would at least have the comfort of a job that pays them for the hard work that goes into reporting and reviewing. Yet, increasingly, journalists and reviewers are being asked to blog in addition to their day jobs, and that work can turn into hours of uncompensated labor. The question: “What do you think?” addressed to anyone who alights upon a publication’s website, has become ubiquitous. Writers are asked to go above and beyond the labor they’ve already put into their pieces and “agree” to endless engagement with readers/trolls. Some of these members of the public might have intelligent questions but the majority of them appear to simply be delighted with the prospect of treating a writer the way they might treat outsourced workers working on their consumer complaints: Badly. Piffle to the travel, the interviews, the photographs, the analysis, the writing, and the filing by deadlines. All of the necessary work that actually goes into writing a piece becomes secondary to this specious form of “engagement” with people who might not even read the original article in its entirety.

The situation is hardly helped by the fact that artists like me are expected to function without the basics like health care and that, as a freelance writer, I cannot seek unemployment. I have sprained the same knee twice in two years, leading to a drastic reduction in my earnings. Intrepid journalism is hard or impossible if you have to ask a fast-trotting subject at a political rally to please slow down so that you can keep up with them. I live with the knowledge that a slightly more serious accident could wipe me out. I do various gigs around town to make what I can and I try to carve out chunks of that most precious commodity, the drug of choice for writers: Time.

I do this because I would not be doing anything else. But the fact that I, and the millions of professional writers like me, would rather not do anything else does not mean that we are pleased with a system that so completely devalues our work. People wonder why my fellow writers and I will not just “get regular or part-time jobs” to pay the bills, but they forget that the current crisis means that even a part-time job is really full-time, and a full-time job automatically means unpaid overtime – if you want to actually keep the job. I taught as an adjunct for three years, which meant a teaching schedule that tenure-track faculty would never endure, at about a quarter or less of their salary, without any time afforded for research or “professional development,” and without time for my own writing. Most people unacquainted with the reality of a writing life cannot grasp the fact that while writing is not taxing in the same way as hard physical labor, it is draining, and not something you do on the fly. People tend to assume that writing is like having a word processor in your head. They imagine that you get on the train, you do your adjunct gig, you write in your head all the while, and you come home and hit print, because somehow, somewhere, it has all been typing itself.

Ironically, it may well be the world of unpaid blog writing that begins to shed some light on the conditions in which writers work, as more of them lose “day jobs” and publishing opportunities become more scarce. The New York-based journalist Stephanie Schroeder recently began a blog, http://werkinggerl.wordpress.com/ to document her experiences in New York City’s Back to Work program. Schroeder had a day job at a public relations firm and also worked as a freelance journalist. She was phased out from the public relations firm in June 2009, after her hours were reduced in February. Finally, unable to find rent for December and without enough freelance assignments to fill in the gap, Schroeder found herself applying for Medicaid and temporary cash assistance, filling out forms for a case worker who could not understand how Schroeder came to be a “middle class white gerl [sic] with a graduate degree who says she’s working as a freelance journalist yet making less than $400 a month.” Schroeder’s point is not to privilege herself as someone who should not be in this position as a middle class white person with a graduate degree, but to point out that what outsiders to the world of writing fail to understand is the inherently unstable nature of writing as a livelihood, and the fact that one’s race and educational background do little to guarantee a steady income. As a freelance writer, Schroeder, like many writers, writes for hire and does not get paid upfront, only after the piece is delivered. This very idea, that we produce work that does not even garner a small portion of the final fee before the final product is delivered, is itself strange to most professionals.

Schroeder, in conversation with me, emphasized that the exploitation of writers begins even at the point of applying for writing jobs. For instance, she pointed out, job applications will often require a writer to turn in 500-word essays on a topic related to the blog/magazine, with the possibility of a byline if the potential employer decides to use it, but without actually paying the writer for her work. Schroeder has responded to these advertisements by sending job posters her résumé and clips, along with an explanation of her fee rates.

The kind of arrogance that allows firms to assume that they can simply demand lengthy pieces from writers even before the point of entry, and use their work to generate money via venues that make money off advertisements, is endemic in a culture where writing is considered a hobby and something that one is just born being good at – as opposed to the reality that every writer understands, that it is a craft steadily honed over a lifetime.

For writers, our work is not our reward; the amount paid for our work is the just reward. But getting people to understand or acknowledge that is uphill work, and my precarious position as a freelance writer also means that people have felt free to exploit me. When I first began my life as a writer, I was shocked to find that the most exploitative people are those embedded in the non-profit/social justice world. I once had the six-figure earning head of a domestic violence organization try to get me to write a grant proposal for nothing. I have had people change their minds about what they owed me after I had turned in the work, which is a delicate way of saying that I have been cheated out of my wages (and yes, that did drive home an important lesson about contracts). At a meeting of activists and organizers, I listened to a high-minded discussion about how the role of progressive media would be to engage more fully with the public on vital issues, and that no holds were to be barred in terms of everyone’s sacrifice. When I asked who would be paying the writers, all eyes turned to me as if I had dared to ask the cost of the china. Independently wealthy people, some with staggeringly large fortunes, dominate the publishing and foundation world, and they have no idea what it means to try to produce work while worrying about rent or food. Nevertheless, my question seemed, and still seems, a reasonable question: Writers provide the content that garners the advertising that keeps publishing alive. Why, then, are they the last and least to be paid? Why are writers made to feel like their work is only ancillary to the carpet and automobile advertisements in a newspaper, magazine, or website? Much of this exploitation has come at the hands of people who are deeply embedded in the arts/social justice world, who assume that their devotion to their causes justifies treating their workers like crap.

So, whose great idea was it to combine art with social justice?

Our Left Art?

Even without the exploitation of the writer/artist, we have still not reached a point where we critically analyze whether or not an art/social justice project is actually left/radical/progressive; we simply assume it to be so. Art/ social justice projects are well intentioned and some are insightful, but the politics of these works rarely does much to challenge the status quo. Instead, the overwhelming message is usually that certain systems of oppression, like racism, sexism, and homophobia, are bad. There is little consideration given to a more nuanced and more devastating analysis of the ideological forces and the economic inequality that keeps those systems alive. Furthermore, some of these projects are implicated in the problematic power dynamics they claim to dismantle. Over the course of my reporting and activism, I have interviewed or otherwise engaged with activist-artists whose work involve the incarcerated – remember the heyday of “prison art?” It becomes painfully obvious that too many of them, often white, are clueless or simply have no concerns about their relative privilege vis-à-vis the prisoners whose work they want to highlight. A woman who worked with women in prison had no idea who they were beyond their status as participants in her grandly envisioned project of self-expression, and seemed oblivious to her relative privilege, as someone who could afford to come and go as she pleased while her subjects were left with no such choice. A man who talked about a prison in the southwest spoke glowingly about the good relations he had established with the guards and authorities and was defensive when asked if such work, which involved increased monitoring of the prisoners, was not further enabling the surveillance mechanisms of the prison industrial complex.

Prison art has waned somewhat in popularity, but it has been supplanted by a surge in interest in hip hop and spoken word. In Chicago, where I live, the arts/social justice calendar is filled with events highlighting the talents of usually black youth, whose refashioning of the genre is part of a larger conversation about the perceived misogynistic and homophobic lyrics of major artists. Much of this is worthwhile, given that the genre itself has been delegitimized and scrutinized by a wider culture that still sees black performers as threatening and violent figures.

But the current fetishization of hip hop amongst mostly white funders comes with the fetishization and commodification of black youth as authentic poets of their generation. There are few things as uncomfortable as sitting amongst white social justice activists nodding to themselves in a self-congratulatory fashion as a black teenager stands on a stage and speaks to the troubles of his or her neighborhood. What is ignored is the fact that the youth are being locked into a performativity that requires them to speak about their experiences but does not take them anywhere near the apparatus that could dismantle systemic oppression. In these conditions, hip hop has become the vernacular of authentic inequality.

What’s Left?

Is there a place for social justice in art? In the current state of things, where artists are exploited by left neoliberals and where the politics of most arts/social justice projects are suspect: None. We, those of us in the art world who also care about social justice, need to begin to critically analyze the exploitative and reductive model of funding that we have enabled so far. We need to stop asking ourselves only: Are these projects going to change the world? Instead, we ought to ask: Are these projects fair and equitable and just in the way they treat artists as workers? Do they really advance an understanding of how we might dismantle the fundamental forms of inequality? Perhaps more importantly: Do they need to? Works of art have historically been linked to social change by exposing cultural and political problems, whether in the novels of Dickens or Picasso’s Guernica. But that pointing to the need for social change comes about when the artist is left unburdened with the specific task of changing the world. A culture that needs to so self-consciously and overtly assign the role of social change to art is a culture that has exhausted its ability to effect truly radical and visionary social change. It is hypocritical to place the burden of change on artists who are expected to perform change for little to nothing, while we allow for the defunding of the apparatus that should keep them alive.

If the genres of “artivism” have waxed and waned, so have the actual structures of funding. The general cuts in funding of the arts across the board have resulted in new and supposedly more flexible mechanisms via which to gather and disburse. In other words, not only is the work of art seen as a way to bring about social justice or change, the very nature of funding itself is being refashioned to look like a form of social justice. On the face of it, some of these funding strategies look more egalitarian, like the cheerily named “umbrella organizations.” Part II of this article will consider the realities of such supposedly more flexible and liberatory funding structures but for now, it is worth remembering that a system that cannot see the exploitative nature of the arts and social justice framework is unlikely to be any less exploitative and neoliberal just because it claims to be a new and progressive form of funding.

I am aware of the reality of arts funding in the U.S. I know that without even the façade of these art/social justice funding projects, a lot of artists in the United States, including me, will struggle to have their work funded. And let me be clear: I do not see “art” of any kind as a purer or nobler ideal divorced from funding or from community ties. But the solution is not to seek forms of funding which simply amplify the exploitation already inherent in the concept of art as social justice. Our time would be better spent in devising ways to wrest back the public debate about funding of the arts. Over the last few decades, we have ceded control of the debate to an intense and organized right wing that now methodically scrutinizes work for the smallest sign of moral degeneration. In the process of reviling the right as a set of conservatives, we have huffed about our own liberal/progressive impulses, and engendered arts projects that do little more than detail tokenistic and liberal solutions for the social problems that ail us.

We, on the left, may not have the billionaires of the right to fund our projects but no one who is part of the arts/social framework can any longer refuse to see that we have slowly built up an exploitative and reductive funding structure and a pedantic genre of art. The only way out is to end the pretence and ask ourselves: Does art serve no purpose if it cannot serve an explicit agenda like “social justice?” In recent years, we have seen public service announcements by celebrities touting the benefits of arts education in elementary schools because it supposedly helps make better mathematicians or physicists out of children. Perhaps the point ought to be that arts education makes for better artists. Perhaps we ought to stop being so apologetic about art and not keep trying to wrap its trembling shoulders with that raggedy shawl of self-righteousness and instead advocate for public school funding that incorporates all aspects of education. Perhaps we ought to accept the fact that artists may produce work that is disinterested in social change, and put some of the burden back on the state to effect the kind of social change we want. Without buying too much into the neoliberal mantra of choice (often a code word for “choose this, or else”), we need to acknowledge that artists should have the power to choose when or if and how they will speak to social justice issues. Without that choice, they are only being exploited in the name of art or, worse still, in the name of art disguised as social justice. The privatization of the arts now mostly requires artists to speak explicitly to social justice, and that robs artists of any autonomy over their creative processes.

Perhaps, horrors, that actually means that we lose the practice of bargain basement hunting for the arts. That we stop expecting writers and dancers to perform for free or almost nothing in the vain hope of “exposure” or “healing.” Perhaps, with the example of the privatized health care system having produced 50 million uninsured, we might now also realize that privatizing the arts leads to similarly devastating consequences for the state of art and that we stand to lose vibrancy and imagination in the sinkhole of vapid social justice projects. In a country where we expect to get a rock bottom price on anything, including the work of writers and dancers, the arts and social justice complex has become the Wal Mart-like purveyor of the fiction of change, that great and now utterly meaningless word that seems to mean “more of the same”. If we really want to see social justice come alive, let us once and for all stop creating more methods of exploiting the arts and stop putting the burden on the artist to carry out our politics of change.

Yasmin Nair is a writer, activist, and academic who lives in Chicago. She is a member of Gender JUST and her work has appeared in make/shift, Maximum Rocknroll, No More Potlucks, Windy City Times, GLQ, and other publications. She thanks Ryan Conrad, James D’Entremont, and Eric Stanley for their contributions to this piece. She can be contacted at nairyasmin at yahoo dot com. Her website, www.yasminnair.net will be up on January 15.

SOURCES

Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Diversity.” New Left Review, 52, July-August 2008
http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2731
Andrew Ross, “The Mental Labor Problem.” Social Text (Volume 18, Number 2), Summer 2000, pp. 1-31
Stephanie Schroder’s blog: http://werkinggerl.wordpress.com/

The evening’s program opened with Balanchine’s Mozartiana from 1981 with music by Tchaikovsky. The ballet is a study of Balanchine at his quintessential–each section showcasing the physicality of the dancers, and a keen surgical understanding and execution of musical phrases. Wendy Whelan, Daniel Ulbricht and Jared Angle danced the lead roles with technical brilliance. Ulbricht dazzled us with his lightning fast feet, and chameleon like ability to be aloft and stretched in one moment only to become a weighted lightning bolt–all angles and grounded the next. Whelan’s sections explore the more subtle phrasings in the music with a very mature understanding. While all the dancers performed with a sharp precision, I would have willingly sacrificed some of it for breath, some softness once in a while or a more expressive torso. Balanchine’s preference for machine like physicality definitely helped ballet move into a new era, but has shorn his company of anything that may allude to its romantic beginnings. His genius in his craft is clearly evident throughout the ballet–almost like a magician drawing attention to the fact that something is about to be pulled out of a hat–coming to a highpoint in the theme and variation section where the musical phrases are explored in myriad ways.

The highlight of the evening, Dances at a Gathering by Jerome Robbins (1969), followed, and oh what a contrast it was! Set to Chopin’s sensitive music, the ballet is lush and rushes through the stage like tumbling leaves on a windy day. The ballet begins with a man walking on as if remembering something and we immediately sense a person as opposed to a dancer on stage. A series of dances follow: solos, duets, trios, group work, most are playful and flirty, but all are so generous where the previous work seems severe at times. Robbins explores the swing in the body, the angles are balanced with flowing curves, the focus is used sparingly and effectively, intriguing lifts come out of nowhere, there is a healthy dose of humor–perhaps even camp, and and who knew running or jumping backwards could look like so much fun? Benjamin Millepied and Adrian Danchig-Waring stood out for their galloping strength tempered with a soft upper body. There is teasing bit in which Maria Kowroski dances the diagonals of the stage with a different man simply walking with her on each diagonal–we wait impatiently for someone to join in with her bubbly dancing. Robbins’ keeps us tantalized and all we get in unison are three simple steps together, just enough to make us dream of the possibility but not satisfying it. When we expect the usual extravagant finale, the piece surprises us with a softer ending, with dancers looking around themselves, remembering and searching for something longingly. Slowly they pair of, but as the curtain drops, they are still searching for the elusive memory of the dance that was.

The evening closed with Balanchine’s Stravinksy Violin Concerto (1972), another black and white ballet. Since music clearly drives Balanchine’s work, Stravinsky’s quirky and intelligent compositions lend a layer of depth to the dance. The two Arias are particularly interesting with Amar Ramasar and Robert Fairchild lingering in your minds long after the piece is over. This was another Balanchine standard with a lot of bravura dancing. But really when it comes down to it, the ballet is simply music visualization like most of his black and white ballets.

The difference between Balanchine and Robbins’ approach seems to be that in Balanchine’s work, I was always, but always, aware of his craft. Whereas in Robbin’s work, the craft is secondary to the art. In Robbins’ ballets, the musical sensitivity and the clever use of the body, space, patterns, and focus are all there, but they are always subservient to something human. Clearly, for Robbins, dance is not about technique but about the art. I never get the sense that there is person behind the dancer in Balanchine’s surgically precise but just as sterile choreography. Purely subjective of course, but there it is.

–Daniel Phoenix Singh