The International Association of Blacks in Dance held its annual conference and festival in Cleveland and from what we could see it was a resounding success. We went to 3 of the 4 dance concerts and mixed some with festival goers at the Wyndham Hotel and the Westin Hotel. All those earnest young dance students, many of them promising pre-professionals, are a passionate dance audience. And we were especially impressed by their unfailing courtesy off the stage.
We had expected an overflow crowd at the free concert Wednesday night at CMA but Gartner Auditorium was only 2/3 full. The good news was that much of the audience was African-American, a demographic that CMA has long tried to cultivate.
Verb Ballets and Dancing Wheels, two local companies we’ve long been familiar with, performed repertoire pieces. Three youth ensembles performed; Duke Ellington School of the Arts from Washington D.C. brought a very popular piece full of effects often seen in dance competitions and music videos but performed with clarity and high spirits; performing less flashy but perhaps more substantive choreographic offerings were Stivers School of the Arts from Dayton and Cleveland’s own Greene Works Youth Ensemble.
One local group totally new to us, Djapo, brought out a colorfully costumed group performing traditional West African singing, dancing and drumming. Local group Hidden Truth also performed.
In Thursday’s Youth Showcase at the Ohio Theatre, we felt that the dancers’ technique was generally better than the choreography. So many young people showed exceptional technical achievement including high, high extensions and impressive multiple turns. But too many of the choreographic offerings served up too much fast and furious dancing in front of too many red cycloramas.
Groups that avoided at least some of these clichés — Dallas Black Dance Academy (Dallas, Texas), Lewis Cass Technical High School (Detroit, MI), Stivers School of the Arts, Greene Works Youth Ensemble, and Duke Ellington School of the Arts — benefited by standing out. We were especially impressed by groups — Dance Theater of Camden (Camden, New Jersey), Lula Washington Professional Development Ensemble (Los Angeles, CA), West Las Vegas Arts Center Performance Ensemble (Las Vegas, NV) — that managed social or political commentary through dance.
On Saturday evening, the Founders Showcase presented eight dances by what are arguably eight of the best African-American dance companies in America. Surely each of these companies brought their best dancers and their best, freshest material. These were dances of moral uplift, social commentary, and technical display. Some were theatrical versions of traditional dances. They included dances in bare feet, tennis shoes and, in Dance Theater of Harlem’s offering, pointe shoes.
DTH could have performed any number of funky, “black” ballets that would have brought the house down, but they chose some typically ambitious repertoire in Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, “a lovely, bravura test for two superb technicians,” as Edward Villela describes it. Dancers Nayara Lopes and Davin Doane passed that test with flying colors on Saturday and the cheers that went up from the youthful audience sent a message to any presenter with ears to hear.
Those young, mostly black dancers are ready to love ballet but ballet needs to love them back. If contemporary ballet wants young African-Americans in the audience, it needs to embody the new demographics by including African-Americans as dancers and choreographers.
The IABD Conference and festival met in Cleveland 1/21 thru 1/25/2015. Sponsors and community partners included the National Endowment for the Arts, Nordson, the George Gund Foundation, the Ohio Arts Council, DanceCleveland, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
[Photo by Amir A.]
From Cool Cleveland contributors Elsa Johnson and Victor Lucas. Elsa and Vic are both longtime Clevelanders. Elsa is a landscape designer. She studied ballet as an avocation for 2 decades. Vic has been a dancer and dance teacher for most of his working life, performing in a number of dance companies in NYC and Cleveland. They write about dance as a way to learn more and keep in touch with the dance community. E-mail them at vicnelsaATearthlink.net.