My latest feature for the New York Times is on Fresh Tracks, a series for early-career choreographers at New York Live Arts that’s been around, in one form or another, for 59 years. I talked to this year’s fabulous cohort — Julia Antinozzi, Vinson Fraley, Liony Garcia, and Symara Sarai — about what it’s like to be “emerging” these days, in a rocky financial moment for NYC dance artists, and their dreams for the future. (The online headline comes from a quote from Symara: “The thing that scares me the most is, like, what is post-emerging?”) You can see their new works, created over an eight-month residency, May 17 and 18 at Live Arts. I think it’s gonna be a great program.
More often than not, my feature-writing process involves conversations that don’t make it into the final draft. For this one, I want to shout out former Fresh Tracks artists Martita Abril and Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, as well as former selection panelists Charmaine Warren and Brian Rogers, all of whom helped me think through how this series fits into the city’s dance landscape and better understand the challenges artists are facing. Thanks to all of them for their insights.
It was also a delight to talk with Wendy Perron, who participated in the series in the 1970s at Dance Theater Workshop (predecessor of New York Live Arts), back when it was called the Studio Series and took place at DTW’s original loft space on West 20th Street. She told me that the artists on a particular program would get together in the loft to help with the bulk mailing of promotional flyers, sorting them by zip code — a “very communal” activity (through which she “memorized a lot of zip codes”):
“Learning to network? Forget it. It was learning to do bulk mail . . . and it was great, you’d get to know each other, you’d be standing around, it would take you maybe five hours . . . It was a collective in a way, it was really a collective.”
I love that anecdote (as Wendy knows) and had a hard time leaving it on the cutting room floor.
Here’s a gift link to the story. And the print edition from yesterday:
A quick Dance List update: the next one will be coming your way early next week, and paid subscriptions, with my personal recommendations of shows to see (a.k.a. Danceletter Picks), will be reopening soon — stay tuned! For now check out Dance List 8, with events through Sunday, May 26, including a few recent updates. As always, if you have something to add, please write to me at danceletter@substack.com.