The 2024 Dance Journal Awards will honor George Faison, Joanna Haigood, Liz Lerman, Mavis Staines, and Shen Wei. The Chairman’s Award will go to Mikhail Baryshnikov for his work with Baryshnikov Arts, and the posthumous awards will rejoice six artists who weren’t acknowledged by the awards committee throughout their lifetimes.
A convention courting again to 1954, the Dance Journal Awards are given in appreciation of the artistry, integrity, and resilience that dance artists have demonstrated over the course of their careers. The theme for 2024 is “the stage and past”: The dancers, choreographers, and educators on this exceptional group of honorees are invested in work that usually transcends the proscenium.
A ceremony to acknowledge this 12 months’s recipients might be held in New York Metropolis at Baryshnikov Arts on Monday, December 2, at 7 pm EST, with performances and shows for every. For ticket info, go to dancemedia.com.
George Faison
George Faison is an award-winning, internationally celebrated producer, author, essayist, composer, director, choreographer, and dancer. He made historical past in 1975 when he grew to become the primary African American to win a Tony Award for finest choreography, for his work on The Wiz.
Faison started his profession as a number one dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and went on to type his personal firm, the George Faison Common Dance Expertise. He has staged live shows for a few of music’s biggest artists and written, directed, and choreographed extensively for musical theater and movie. In 2000, Faison and Tad Schnugg established The Faison Firehouse Theater, a novel arts-based outreach and youth theater venture, in a decommissioned firehouse in Harlem.
Joanna Haigood
Since 1980 Joanna Haigood has been creating work that makes use of pure, architectural, and cultural environments as factors of departure for motion exploration and narrative. Her phases have included grain terminals, a clock tower, the pope’s palace, navy forts, and a mile of neighborhood streets within the South Bronx. Her work has been commissioned by many arts establishments, together with Dancing within the Streets, Jacob’s Pillow, the Walker Artwork Heart, the Nationwide Black Arts Competition, and Competition d’Avignon. Haigood has had the privilege to mentor many extraordinary younger artists on the École Nationale des Arts du Cirque, the Trinity Laban Conservatoire, Spelman Faculty, Stanford College, the San Francisco Circus Heart, and Zaccho Studio.
Liz Lerman
Liz Lerman is a choreographer, educator, creator, mom, spouse, and daughter. A serial entrepreneur, she based Dance Alternate in 1976 and has since efficiently handed it on to different sensible artists. Her dances, from New York Metropolis Winter (1974) to Depraved Our bodies (2022), rejoice embodied data with uncommon topics and storytelling strategies; her new dance-based public paintings, My Physique is a Library, continues this exploration. A professor at Arizona State College, Lerman is the creator of a number of books that reveal the curiosity that motivates her choreographic processes. Her many awards embody a MacArthur Fellowship, a Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Mavis Staines
A visionary educator and chief, Mavis Staines is without doubt one of the foremost champions of ballet evolution, acknowledged all over the world for her braveness and integrity in seizing each alternative to make dance extra inclusive and accessible. Throughout her 35 years as inventive director of Canada’s Nationwide Ballet College (NBS), her management modeled bold methods of taking the artwork type into the long run.
Lately retired, she stays dedicated to work on advancing fairness and addressing anti-Black racism in ballet’s practices. She now serves as an NBS World Ambassador, working in partnership with NBS on key initiatives, and serving the artwork type of ballet as a complete.
Shen Wei
Shen Wei is a choreographer, painter, dancer, and director. Born in Hunan, China, he was a founding member of the nation’s first trendy dance troupe, Guangdong Trendy Dance Firm. In 1995, he was awarded a fellowship to check on the Nikolais/Louis Dance Lab and moved to New York. In 2000 he based his personal firm, Shen Wei Dance Arts, which has since toured to greater than 140 cities. He choreographed the opening ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and has obtained commissions from dance organizations all over the world; his dance approach, “Pure Physique Growth,” has been taught extensively. His quite a few awards embody a MacArthur Fellowship and the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Competition Award for Lifetime Achievement in Choreography.
Chairman’s Award: Mikhail Baryshnikov
Born in Riga, Latvia, Mikhail Baryshnikov is taken into account one of many biggest dancers of our time. After commencing a spectacular profession with the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad, he got here to the West in 1974, the place he joined American Ballet Theatre as a principal dancer. In 1980 he was appointed inventive director of ABT, the place, for the subsequent decade, he launched a brand new technology of dancers and choreographers. In 1990, Baryshnikov and choreographer Mark Morris co-founded the White Oak Dance Mission, with the intent to broaden the repertoire and visibility of American trendy dance. In 2005, Mikhail Baryshnikov launched Baryshnikov Arts, a artistic house in New York Metropolis designed to help multidisciplinary artists from across the globe.
Posthumous Awards
This 12 months’s posthumous awards pay tribute to dancer, singer, and movie star Carmen Amaya; dancer, choreographer, and director Talley Beatty; dancer and humanitarian Michaela Mabinty DePrince; dancer and educator ‘Iolani Luahine; pioneering dancer Raven Wilkinson; and dancer, director, and educator Yuriko.
Keep tuned for Dance Journal‘s December challenge to study extra about every of those artists and the way they’ve formed the dance subject.
