A weekly podcast, hosted by editors from Dance Media, that breaks down the dance world's news and talks with with the artists who are shaping the headlines.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Hi dance friends, and welcome to The Dance Edit podcast. I'm Margaret Fuhrer.
Lydia Murray:
I'm Lydia Murray.
Amy Brandt:
And I'm Amy Brandt.
Margaret Fuhrer:
We are editors at Dance Media. And we are at almost full strength today, we've got three out of four of us, which is such a treat. We're here for our fifth ever mailbag episode.
A quick refresher on what a mailbag episode is: We asked you all to send in your suggestions for dance-world discussion topics you'd like us to dig into, and today we have chosen two of those topics. So the first is the growing use of intimacy directors in dance, a field where physical intimacy is part of the job description. And then we'll have the second installment in what I hope will be a never-ending series: We're going to talk about some more overlooked moments in dance history, as we did in one of our earlier mailbag pods.
If your topic did not make the cut this episode, never fear; we'll be doing more mail backgrounds very soon, and we are keeping a running list of all your suggestions. If you have not yet sent us your ideas or if you have new ones, please give us a shout on social media. You can find us at @thedance.edit on Instagram and @dance_edit on Twitter. We love hearing from you.
All right. So our first topic today is intimacy directors in dance, which was submitted by Felipe Panama on Instagram. Thank you, Felipe. We did talk a little bit about intimacy directors and coaches on the pod back in April of 2022, when the New York Times did a big story about how ballet companies were beginning to bring them in to help dancers navigate potentially uncomfortable choreography. But something that Felipe pointed out is how odd it is that dance was much slower to adopt this practice than film and TV and theater—they were just years ahead. So looking at why that might have been and what finally spurred the dance field to change, maybe that's a good place to start.
Lydia Murray:
This might sound a little bit cynical guess, but I was wondering if film, TV and theater maybe believed that they had more to lose than the dance world. Those are much more lucrative industries, especially the first two. And they may have faced more public scrutiny from things like the Me Too movement than Dance did.
Margaret Fuhrer:
And money—they had the resources to bring in intimacy directors.
Lydia Murray:
Yeah.
Amy Brandt:
I think I am actually not surprised that dance kind of came along a little later, just because dancers work with their bodies as this tool and form of expression, and it's almost in this metaphorical sense as opposed to the very literal sense when you're acting. Dance is a different kind of an art form in that way.
And there's also, I think, an expectation that dancers are just going to be comfortable with closeness, with touching. You learn from an early age how to partner, and you get used to that. And it's very weird at first when you're an awkward teenager learning how to do partnered pirouettes or whatever, in class. But you get used to it and then it's not as unusual and there's just kind of an expectation that you need to know how to do this and that you're the tool to express the choreographer's vision. So if you're in a rehearsal setting and someone is choreographing on you and they ask you to do something and go to this kind of uncomfortably intimate place, the way that it's been all set up, it's kind of hard to push back in the moment, I think, because of the power dynamics.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. Several of the stories written about this have mentioned that since physical intimacy is kind of baked into dance that way, and dancers are also trained to and expected to just put up with more physically—like, discomfort is part of a lot of dance culture—so there was sort of a cultural shift that needed to happen before the idea of intimacy directors became more widely accepted.
I also thought it was worth noting that...I don't know, Amy, I'm so interested in what you're saying about how dance, it's often more abstract, the portrayal of intimacy is in many ways more abstract and yet the touching that's actually happening is much more concrete and often much more aggressive. So that strange tension is something that has to be resolved, that's what makes the job of an intimacy coach in dance so complicated.
But another thing that makes it complicated, and one of the stories talked about this too, is that on a film set or in theater often an intimacy director is doing the choreography. They're actually setting the performers' movements in highly-charged scenes. Whereas in dance, they're often trying to work with preset choreography. So, intimacy coaches in dance face just a different set of challenges and kind of require a different skillset than intimacy coaches for a filmed love scene.
Amy Brandt:
Yeah. I also wonder too... I mean didn't really in my career... I was trying to think of works I had done where I had ever felt uncomfortable or that it felt like it was crossing into this sort of sexual territory with the subject matter. And I didn't really do much in that regard, but I did have friends and colleagues who did have to do prolonged kissing scenes in Romeo and Juliet, things like that. Mayerling, my goodness, that is profoundly intimate and physical. And I don't know how those conversations go in the rehearsal, 'cause I wasn't in them, but did they have conversations? I don't really know. Or were they just like, "Okay, and here you kiss, go." I'm not sure how those went down, so I don't really know what to say about that. But it would be nice if it is now kind of a conversation, something you talk about with your partner and whoever is there in the room with you and the intimacy coordinator.
But, also partnering in general, I often say this, and I've heard actors actually say this too when they're doing a love scene that they're just thinking about so many other things, the blocking, the lights, the this, the that, where the camera is, that it doesn't feel sensual or anything. But I can see if you have a partner that is not on the same page with you or doesn't understand physical boundaries, touching, et cetera, when it's okay to do this, when it's not okay to do this—that, I mean, it always should have been, but I do think that needs to be addressed because it can make for extremely uncomfortable situations.
Lydia Murray:
I was just thinking about how good it can be when intimacy coordinators are able to be a direct line of communication to some sort of HR type figure or department who can actually do something about anyone who's violating boundaries. And I was also thinking about that Dance Magazine interview with an intimacy consultant where she talks about defining consent. Because what the audience perceives, also, of course, matters a lot, and it can differ from what the performers themselves are experiencing or what they maybe even feel like they're communicating or presenting.
Amy Brandt:
What the audience sees is not how it feels to the dancers.
Lydia Murray:
Right.
Amy Brandt:
So if the audience sees what looks like entwined bodies in this pas de deux, to the dancers, it's a lot of physical discomfort, just from like—
Margaret Fuhrer:
Being hoisted around.
Amy Brandt:
—the twisting and the lifting and where the hands are, and it's often kind of uncomfortable. A press lift always kind of hurt a little bit or fish always made me want to barf, but you have to make it look like...
Margaret Fuhrer:
A torch lift? [laughter]
Amy Brandt:
Yeah!
So this idea of consent... I was in a situation once with a choreographer where something important was not presented at the time of hiring that was then kind of sprung on the dancers during the rehearsal process, which created a lot of issues. I do think that certain things need to be up front with the dancers if they're going to be required to do nudity or to do this kind of really intimate work that might cross the line.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Hopefully intimacy directors become just a more standard practice throughout the industry generally. And as that happens, that also leads to conversations about, well, what should be in contracts when we're talking about freelance dance work if it's going to involve intimate physical touch, if it's going to involve nudity. So that it stops being as fraught—it's just part of a negotiation that always happens.
Amy Brandt:
Right. And less of just like an expectation.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yeah. This is a huge complicated topic, so I don't mean to stop us short. But in the show notes, we do have links to several stories about intimacy direction in dance. I hope you can check them out. There have been some great stories written about that, that get into all of these subtleties and nuances.
All right. So our second topic today is overlooked moments or people in dance history, which was submitted a while back by Katie Williams on Twitter. So thanks again to Katie. We went through an initial round of these in a previous mailbag episode and we're bringing the topic back again because it was just so stinking fun the first time. So, what neglected bits of dance history would we like to highlight today? Lydia, you're up.
Lydia Murray:
Okay, so I'm going to talk about a dancer I recently wrote about named Maria Skorsiuk. Skorsiuk is a little known figure in ballet history, but she's believed to have been the first ballerina of African descent in the Imperial Russian Ballet in St. Petersburg. So she was born in 1872 in St. Petersburg, and though her lineage is a bit of a mystery, she likely descended from the Moors of the Russian court, who were Black servants of royalty in Imperial Russia. She was of mixed race, she was Black and Russian. She attended the Imperial Theater School. And in 1888, after her spring exams, theater officials actually tried to expel her from the school for supposedly either not making enough progress or lacking ability. At this point, she was about 16 and she likely didn't have the skills to support herself any other way because she had been primarily trained in ballet. So if she was truly facing expulsion solely due to incompetence or lack of potential, it was also a little bit late for that to be happening.
So Ekaterina Vazem, who was her teacher, fought this. Vazem pushed for Skorsiuk to take a second test, and she told her that this time don't pause between the set exercises. She believed it would be better for her to dance smoothly, as she put it, even if she made mistakes, because the examiners would only evaluate based on the general impressions of her dancing. And that time Skorsiuk passed and she got to stay at the school.
In her last year as a student, she performed in the world premiere of Petipa's Sleeping Beauty. She was one of the girls accompanying Aurora. Vazem also fought for Skorsiuk to enter the company. After she joined the company, her signature roles eventually came to be the Spanish dance in Swan Lake and the Saracen dance in Raymonda, and she danced mainly character parts. Unfortunately, she died of tuberculosis when she was only about 28 or 29 years old. But for more in-depth information about her, please read Peter Koppers' profile of her for the Petipa Society. And I also had the honor of interviewing him about her for Pointe. Thank you to Peter, and also to Doug Fullington for connecting us and for providing me with source material on Ekaterina Vazem.
Margaret Fuhrer:
That was such a great Q&A with Peter Koppers. We'll link to that in the show notes. Lydia, thanks for sharing that. I'd never heard even a whisper of that story before. That was fascinating.
Lydia Murray:
Yeah, it was fascinating to research.
Amy Brandt:
I love how some of that—that choreography still lives today in Raymonda, right?
Lydia Murray:
Yes. It was originally more of an extreme back bend, supported only by the head. Her influence kind of continued to this day in ways that people might not necessarily know about.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Incredibly cool.
All right, so my forgotten moment is from a totally different corner of the dance world in a totally different era. It's about Madonna's Blonde Ambition Tour from 1990. That's the one that was famous for the Jean Paul Gaultier cone bras, and it's the one that Pope John Paul II condemned as an abomination. I think he said "Satan has been released into the world," or something.
So the choreographer for that "abomination" was Vincent Paterson, the dance artist who was behind some of the most iconic music videos and tours of the 1980s and '90s. But here's the fun fact. Did you know that originally a well-known contemporary ballet choreographer was supposed to choreograph that tour? Actually, let's play guess who. Who do you think it was? Remember, the year is 1990. Here's a big hint, an unfortunately large hint: It was a woman.
Amy Brandt:
Oh...Karole Armitage?
Margaret Fuhrer:
Yes! It was Karole Armitage.
Lydia Murray:
That makes sense.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Isn't that crazy? Yeah. It is both weird, and it also makes total sense. She did not end up choreographing it, and this is a forgotten story that I learned from Vincent Paterson's memoir, Icons and Instincts, which is just full of these kinds of forgotten stories. Apparently Madonna—who remember studied at the Martha Graham School, she knew what was going on in the dance world—Madonna brought Karole in because she wanted an avant-garde look for the tour. It did not work out. According to Vincent, the two did not see eye to eye creatively. And so Vincent, who had worked with Madonna a ton by that point, was brought in to kind of save the day.
Of course, the tour was ultimately a huge success. That said, I feel like I would still be interested in a Madonna-Karole Armitage collaboration like today. Doesn't it seem like they could do something super cool together?
Amy Brandt:
Very cool.
Margaret Fuhrer:
They're both older and wiser, maybe they could find a better groove. But anyway, yeah, as I said, Vincent's book is just full of those kinds of stories.
One more because it made me giggle. Did you know that Vincent was the only dancer to appear in both Michael Jackson's Beat It video and also Weird Al's Eat It video? Which tells you a little about him. [laughter]
I thought that was great. Anyway, it's definitely worth a read, Icons and Instincts by Vincent Paterson. Check it out.
Lydia Murray:
Love that.
Amy Brandt:
Well, my little tidbit of dance history goes back to Pointe's 22nd anniversary event, which we had back in May, and we did a historic walking tour of New York City. But due to time constraints I was not able to expound on this particular piece of history, so I thought I would share it here.
If you are on the corner in New York City, if you are on the corner of 62nd Street and Central Park West, which is not far from Lincoln Center, right across from the park, you'll see a very beautiful apartment building. It's about 30 stories tall. But before that building was there, it was the site of the Century Theater, which was a very ornate Beaux-Arts style theater that opened in 1909. It was only around for about 20 years, but it was a very important site in dance history because it is a site of a very historic performance in American dance history, because that is where the US premiere of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes occurred in 1916.
So the theater itself was very beautiful, was designed by a Beaux-Arts architectural firm, and sat about 2,300 people. There are pictures, I think on Wikipedia, you can go check it out, it was gorgeous. This was a site of where the Ballets Russes performed in the United States for the first time. The tour was sponsored by the Metropolitan Opera Company, and there was a lot of anticipation, a lot of New York's wealthy elite had heard about the company or had even seen it on their European travels. But this was also during World War I and Russian Revolution. So on opening night on January 17th, 1916, it was kind of a lackluster performance. The reviews are kind of mixed because of this war situation, just like how the war in Ukraine has disrupted life for Ukrainian ballet companies, for the dancers at the Ballets Russes there were a lot of long interruptions in their performances and in their training, many of the dancers had scattered all across Europe. So the standard of dancing wasn't quite up to the level that it had been in Europe.
It was a smaller company, and it was also missing two of its biggest stars, Vaslav Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina. So also the audiences were scandalized by the repertoire, of course, Afternoon of a Faun and Scheherazade and all of that.
Nijinsky eventually did rejoin the company. This performance was part of a long US tour. So it started at the Century Theater, then it went and toured a bunch of other American cities and came back to New York and had another run at the Metropolitan Opera House, and Nijinsky did join the company later, so eventually he was there. But yeah, just kind of an interesting bit to know if you were to walk by the corner of 62nd and Central Park West, you'd never know that this kind of incredible moment in dance history happened right there.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Right where those luxury condos now stand. Actually, I'm going to be in New York City tonight, I'll go walk by and feel some history.
Lydia Murray:
I'll have to stop by that area myself next time I'm in the city.
Margaret Fuhrer:
Alrighty, that brings our fifth mailbag episode to a close. Thanks everyone for joining us. We'll be back soon with more discussion of the news that's moving the dance world. Keep learning, keep advocating, and keep dancing. See you next time.
Amy Brandt:
Bye everybody.