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Bard Alumna Joanna Haigood ’79 Honored with Dance Magazine Award

The 2024 Dance Magazine Awards honor Bard alumna Joanna Haigood ’79, alongside George Faison, Liz Lerman, Mavis Staines, Shen Wei, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, whose work with Baryshnikov Arts earned him the Chairman’s Award. From its first year in 1954, the Dance Magazine Awards have been given annually in appreciation of the artistry, integrity, and resilience that dance artists have demonstrated over the course of their careers. The theme for this year’s awards is “the stage and beyond”—the dancers, choreographers, and educators recognized are invested in work that often transcends the proscenium.

“Since 1980 Joanna Haigood has been creating work that uses natural, architectural, and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative,” says the Dance Magazine Awards statement. “Her stages have included grain terminals, a clock tower, the pope’s palace, military forts, and a mile of neighborhood streets in the South Bronx. Her work has been commissioned by many arts institutions, including Dancing in the Streets, Jacob’s Pillow, the Walker Art Center, the National Black Arts Festival, and Festival d’Avignon. Haigood has had the privilege to mentor many extraordinary young artists at the École Nationale des Arts du Cirque, the Trinity Laban Conservatoire, Spelman College, Stanford University, the San Francisco Circus Center, and Zaccho Studio.”

Post Date: 10-22-2024

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Bard Dance Professor Yebel Gallegos Awarded MADarts Residency

Bard Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Yebel Gallegos will spend the week of March 18– 22 in the MADarts Residency Program, which provides artists and their collaborators unlimited access to a dance studio and a quiet, comfortable living space at the Modern Accord Depot in Accord, New York. Gallegos will continue work on his long-term dance production project, MACHO Sensibilities, which critically examines the imposition of machismo on male-identifying dancers of Mexican and Mexican-American descent. During the residency, he will be developing a new section with his collaborators that is set to premiere at the Faculty Dance Concert, taking place in the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts’ LUMA Theater at Bard College in spring 2024.The section will be a trio comprising three Mexican and Mexican-American artists including Gallego, costume and stage designer David Arevalo, and composer/sound designer/percussionist Jonathan Rodriguez. This research project is anchored in autoethnographic writing, oral history research, and movement analysis. “I define machismo as an exaggerated performance of a ‘man’s role’ as it is encouraged by the confines of heteronormativity and patriarchy. Machismo overshadows the individuality of gender representation, preventing the inclusion of diverse interpretations of masculinity in society,” writes Gallego.

Post Date: 02-28-2024

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Baye & Asa, Codirected by Sam Asa Pratt ’14, Wins Harkness Promise Award at 2023 Dance Magazine Awards

Alumnus Sam Asa Pratt ’14 performed at the 2023 Dance Magazine Awards Ceremony, where Pratt received a Harkness Promise Award alongside Amadi Washington. Their dance company, Baye & Asa, was praised by Harkness Foundation for Dance Executive Director Joan Finkelstein for its ability to “create political metaphors, interrogate systemic inequities, and contemporize ancient allegories.” Accepting the award, Pratt said, “In a contemporary world, there’s a lot of pressure to put yourself into a camp, to distill, succinctly and uncompromisingly, what you believe and where you stand. I think dance is uniquely positioned as an art form that can liberate thought into indeterminacy and to widen toward multiplicity instead of narrowing towards one singular thesis. Art remains one of the most advanced pieces of technology we have as a species.”

Post Date: 12-19-2023

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Bard College Dance Program Launches Two-Year Partnership with Villa Albertine

Beginning in fall 2023, the Bard College Dance Program is launching a two-year partnership with Villa Albertine, a cultural institution that supports exchanges in arts and ideas between the United States, France, and beyond. Each semester, artists selected by Tara Lorenzen, director of Bard’s Dance Program, and Nicole Birmann Bloom, Villa Albertine’s program officer for the performing arts, in collaboration with Centre National de la Danse (CN D, Pantin, France) and other French choreographic centers, will teach technique and repertory courses in Bard’s dance curriculum.

“The Bard Dance Program is thrilled to partner with Villa Albertine,” said Lorenzen. “There has always been a robust exchange of innovative dance ideas between French-supported artists and the US and I look forward to continuing this tradition with the next generation of dance students here in Annandale.”

During the spring semester, a choreographer will conduct a one week creative residency in the Luma Theater/Fisher Center with a public showing for the Bard community and masterclasses for the student body.  A unique component of this partnership allows Bard dance students to participate in the international dance platform CAMPING at the CN D in Pantin, France, each June. CN D is a public institution created in 1998, devoted to the preservation of choreographic and dance culture. Its distinctive CAMPING dance festival gives students the opportunity to work with choreographers from around the globe, perform their own choreographic projects, and develop teaching practices by conducting morning classes with their peers.

The partnership is launching during Albertine Dance Season, the year-long exploration of dance from inception to performance that includes multi-city tours by French, France-based, African, and Caribbean companies, artistic residencies for up-and-coming choreographers, a dance-themed symposium featuring global leaders in the field, and more. 

“The team at Villa Albertine shares with Bard College the deepest appreciation of the true value of educational exchange and the enduring cultural benefits of arts in education,” said Gaëtan Bruel, cultural counselor and director of Villa Albertine. ” We have the greatest confidence that this two-year partnership will uniquely support and sustain Bard students in the enrichment of their arts experience while at Bard and shape their future artistry.”

Since 2009, the Bard Dance Program has hosted an in-residence dance company or performing arts organization bringing professional technique and composition to the academic program in the form of teaching, educational licensing projects, master classes, full-Company production residencies, and public performances.

This fall, choreographers and performers Marcela Santander (Chile/France) and Volmir Cordeiro (Brazil/France) will join the Dance faculty in Annandale-on-Hudson. Wanjiru Kamuyu (Kenya/France/USA) will have a discussion on September 18, 2023, based on her current touring project “An Immigrant’s Story” and her unique creative process.

Post Date: 08-29-2023

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Maria Q. Simpson Launches Ballet Website for Educators

Maria Q. Simpson, professor of dance at Bard College, has launched Three Ballet Teachers... (3BT) in collaboration with Zvi Gotheiner and Hannah Wiley. 3BT is an online resource featuring video documentation of original ballet class choreography by the three contemporary ballet teachers. “The website provides teachers of all levels of experience with choreographed center-floor sequences that can be used in full or in part, or as inspiration for their own classes,” Maria said. The project came out of the mutual belief among Simpson, Gotheiner, and Wiley that ballet class choreography represents a huge body of unrecognized creative work, and that this work should be accessible. “3BT is looking to both highlight and exalt the training space and the choreography that occurs there as representative of the living history of the art form,”  Maria said.

Post Date: 08-16-2023

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New York Times Profiles Bard’s Fisher Center: At 20, an Upstate Arts Haven Keeps Breaking New Ground

The Fisher Center at Bard has become an incubator for commercially promising new work like Justin Peck’s Illinois, while holding tight to its experimental roots.
For the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler visits Bard’s Fisher Center in its 20th anniversary season, on the heels of a sold-out, extended run of Illinois, to talk with Fisher Center Artistic Director Gideon Lester, Illinois director Justin Peck, choreographer Pam Tanowitz, President Leon Botstein, and others about the Fisher Center’s past and future. “Since opening 20 years ago,” she writes, “the center’s Frank Gehry building has emerged as a hothouse for the creation of uncompromising, cross-disciplinary, and sometimes hard to describe hits.”

Post Date: 07-05-2023