This week we’re sharing tributes to all the 2024 Dance Journal Award honorees. For tickets to the awards ceremony on December 2, go to retailer.dancemedia.com.
The identify Mikhail Baryshnikov is synonymous with creative brilliance and the fun of efficiency. However within the 5 a long time since Baryshnikov’s sudden and extremely publicized departure from what was then the Soviet Union, his identify has additionally come to be linked with one other equally beneficial endeavor: the fostering of latest and revolutionary works. This was true when Baryshnikov was the creative director of American Ballet Theatre (1980–1989), and later when he co-founded the touring ensemble White Oak Dance Challenge, with Mark Morris, in 1990.
However it’s with the creation of the Baryshnikov Arts Middle, now Baryshnikov Arts, that this mission has discovered its most distilled expression. Because it opened its doorways in Hell’s Kitchen in 2005, Baryshnikov Arts has provided house and assist to artists in any respect phases of their improvement. The purpose has been to ease the monetary stress on them, and thus encourage bold, brave pondering: an opportunity to transcend what they’ve completed earlier than, to discover new inventive pathways and check out various things.
“Once I realized we may have an area with a number of studios, I began to consider a much bigger image,” Baryshnikov mentioned lately. “My hope was to create a spot the place artists would really feel secure, supported, and at house.” Baryshnikov Arts has turn into precisely that, by means of stay performances and commissions, however most crucially by means of its residency program. Recipients of those residencies, which quantity as much as 20 per yr, obtain funding, rehearsal time, administrative and manufacturing assist, and the chance to point out their work-in-process in the event that they so select. They’ve included Yasuko Yokoshi, Rashaun Mitchell, Okwui Okpokwasili, Pam Tanowitz, Camille A. Brown, Ain Gordon, John Jasperse, and plenty of others, some well-known, others simply beginning out. Greater than 300 works have sprung from these residencies.
The establishment bears Baryshnikov’s identify, however its work is the results of the mixed efforts of a braintrust, since October 2022 led by its president and govt director, Sonja Kostich. “I’m happy with every part we’ve achieved to date,” says Baryshnikov, “however the residency program has a particular place in my coronary heart.”
