Green

By Paul Gordon Emerson

I write often in this column about the need to think outside the box. Mostly that's about art, but sometimes it's about things which, on the surface, have nothing at all to do with art. Most of the time, those are actually the most important places to think. Staying inside "what's comfortable" is exceptionally limiting, particularly when that comfort zone is pretty darned small (which it is by definition when your comfort is contemporary dance).

The same thing holds true in business. The traditional ways, the comfortable ways, have led us to some of the most damaging practices in our treatment of the environment. Changing how we do that is of paramount importance. It's also hard, hard, hard. So when the Washington Business Journal, a bellweather publication in the private sector, decided to create an award celebrating Green Business practices I had two thoughts: 1) it's a great way to motivate good work in the business community; 2) I wanted in.

Thanks to great nominations from our good friend Lee Poston at the World Wildlife Fund and K. Williams at the Harman Center, CityDance was named a finalist in the First Annual Green Business Awards. Our category was education. The list of businesses nominated as finalists reads like a who's who in DC business. Akridge, Pepco, WC Smith Group and many others. We were the only arts organization even nominated. Tonight, CityDance came home with the plaque naming us a winner. That's an exceptional honor, and also remarkable to be in such distinguished company with these great businesses. It's a testament to the WBJ that they took us seriously, and also that they reached out to recognize the impact art can have on awareness and education in how we change the way we live on this planet.

This Friday the WBJ is publishing a Special Edition on Green. We'll be right there in it.

There are two reasons: a great staff of people dedicated to the issue (Betsy, Asanga, Tish and Dina in particular) and having a belief that we belonged with that group of A list businesses. The next steps are to build on the partnerships made possible at the reception, and to team up with forward-thinking businesses to raise our impact, our opportunities and the synergy which should exist between art and business. It's a remarkable honor.

Showstoppers

By Paul Gordon Emerson

The October edition of Washingtonian Magazine was a giant shout-out to the arts.

Among the features was one called "Showstoppers -- 20 artists not-to-miss." CityDance's Jason Ignacio was named one of those 20, an exceptional honor for him and for us. We're very proud of Agent I, as we call him, and heading into our season debut this Saturday, October 18th at 7:30pm at the Kennedy Center we thought we'd share his video profile with you.

Enjoy.

Orchestrations

By Paul Gordon Emerson

Doors and windows. As in opened and closed. The old saw "when God closes a door he opens a window." Religious allusions aside, I've always seen that metaphor by noting that walking out of a door usually lands you on a threshold. Stepping outside a window....

This probably has something to do with growing up on the 11th floor of a Manhattan high rise. The flip side of course is you can see a lot further looking through the window than the door.

For whatever reason this is basically what went through my head when I picked up a message about two weeks ago from the Director of Education of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. It was hard to tell if she had been thrown through the door or out the window, but it wasn't pretty. But the call for help opened a window to a chance to dance with one of the great orchestras in the world. Two new dances, both for a kids program, to the music of Tchaikovsky and Ravel. Not much money, but enough. Not much time, but....but...but...enough?

The trick to making dances for kids is that you can't be afraid of them. And that, in turn, means being willing to let them laugh. It also means romance and beauty. Or, as Liz put it the other day, Disney by Numbers. That might sound cynical, but it's not. We love Disney films for a reason. How many of us are to this day traumatized by Bambi's mother being shot off camera, or the forest fire? We see things through 5, 6 and 7 year old eyes with such wonder.

It's far too easy to get complicated when you make dances "for adults." I still don't know what that's about, though I fall prey to it just as much as the next person. But when it's about kids you get to strip that away and remember that honesty, leavened with a bit of slapstick, is what you need.

Welcome to "Beauty, the Beast...and the three ducks." Take Jerome as the handsome prince, Liz as Beauty, put them in elegant and classic costumes. Add in Kate, Maggie and Daniel, and put them in....well...yellow unitards with orange feathers and big butts. Any guess what it means to ask professional dancers who spend years training to be graceful to go out on stage in front of a world class orchestra and a couple thousand kids looking like a cartoon? Yeah.

But they nailed it. There's really nothing like the sound of laughter from little people. It powers a room even if you turn off the lights. Jerome walked out and there was a collective sigh from the girls. Liz entered and there was more. The ducks came out, and Daniel bounded onto the stage and crashed to the floor and there was....laughter; which went on until he left the stage 5 minutes later.

It's what you live for. Something you can hear for days. Through an open window and a closed door.

WAR: Entry Three

In the last of CityDance's video series on Austin McCormick's War, Ludovic Jolivet talks with Mr. McCormick about his motivations in making the dance, and on the questions that he hopes it may raise.

WAR: Entry Two

Videographer/choreographer/documentarian Ludovic Jolivet's behind the scenes look at CityDance's choreographers for Next continues with his second entry for War by Austin McCormick, who is joined here by his colleague Yeva Glover.

A talk with Christopher K. Morgan

CityDance Rehearsal Director and Choreographer in Residence Christopher K. Morgan sat down with Ludovic Jolivet and talked about art, choreography and the path to DC. Mr. Morgan is staging his Ties That Bind for CityDance's season opening concert Next on Saturday, October 18 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Showtime is 7:30. Tickets are available on the Kennedy Center website (www.kennedy-center.org).

WAR: An Introduction

As CityDance heads towards it's 2008-2009 season opening concert at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Saturday, October 18 at 7:30pm in the Terrace Theater) we're posting video documentaries with our choreographers. We start with Austin McCormick, whose work War has it's Washington premiere with us at the Terrace Theater.

Mass Transit

By Paul Gordon Emerson

So, buses.

Scarce marketing dollars. Getting the word out. Market differentiation. Visibility.

The conventional marketing wisdom is that, for dance and dance concerts you advertise in the Washington Post on the weekends or, if you really muster the monetary muscle, on an extended four or five day run.

The premise is simple: buy ads in a place where people are already predisposed to buying in the general area (or market segment) of what you are selling. Makes sense. Except that ads in the Post are madly expensive, and dance, even when you are as successful as CityDance is, has a very limited concert run, and that means limited ticket revenue to compensate for the costs of those ads. By definition, you lose money on major advertising. But you have to do something, right?

Yes, but what?

That depends on your outcomes. Yes, if you want to hold concerts you want an audience at those concerts. To get that audience you have to make sure people, you know, know, you're having a concert. But they also have to care that you're having a concert. Teeny tiny ads in the Washington Post don't do that just 'cause they're there in print. People have to know who you are, think what you are doing is cool, or interesting, or at least worth a look. And in dance the core beginning to that level of interest lies in visuals. That's what the art form is: visual. An ad in the Washington Post that's large enough to have a real photograph at a significant size in it can cost as much as the concert does to produce. That's not simply impractical, it's impossible.

One of the great problems with dance in DC is it's inability to think outside the norm, the box. We try too hard to fit inside the conventions of what we think works. We don't get on television because we don't think we can. We don't do radio because we don't think we can. But those reasons are exactly why we have to. Find the unexpected way to get noticed, because that, in and of itself, can generate interest.

So, buses.

If you want a very large place to put photographs -- really large photographs -- you need something equally large. Those are hard to come by. And if you want something that people are looking for, well, buses are something a lot of people look for -- or look out for.

In and of itself that's not enough unless you can buy a whole lot of buses. We couldn't. But thanks to a donor we could buy some. Five to be exact. You need to build the buzz around those buses if they're going to have more value than a random drive-by.

So today we're launching our collateral campaign. "Have you seen the bus?" We're all camera phone obsessed these days. We can take a picture anywhere at a moments notice. So anyone who sees the bus, and gets a photo of it, gets that shot on the CityDance website and gets a chance to win two tickets to our January show, Entangled. It's about building buzz overall, buzz for the upcoming show at The Kennedy Center but, more important, building brand that carries over. Everyone is out in September and October when the weather is warm. No one is out in January when it's cold. So the decision to put the buses on the street in September and October had to carry-over to the key concert to promote -- January.

So, between now and the end of October keep an eye out on Wisconsin Avenue for the CityDance bus. Grab a shot, or send in a sighting to info@citydance.net, and get a shot at tickets to a show.

Arts on Foot

by Paul Gordon Emerson

Street festivals -- a mixed bag to be sure, but when they work they're a complete blast. Arts on Foot, September 13th, 2008 was a blast. As we did last year the company performed. But this year we were outside on the street, on a raised stage at the end of 6th and F streets, NW. It was a ton of fun for us, and, also as we did last year, after we danced the first show we jumped out to do some shooting on the street.

Han

By Paul Gordon Emerson

Han is a Korean word for which there is no literal translation. It means, roughly, "a state of sorrow so deep there are no tears, yet there is still hope." It's a word I didn't know when the dance company traveled to Sarajevo, the Capital of Bosnia & Herzegovina, to perform in the summer of 2006. I found it only after we had come back, and for me it defined the city I had long been in love with without ever entering. 

Sarajevo was a symbol of the ability of people to get along, to cooperate, to find common ground, common purpose and love across religion and ethnic diversity for 800 years. While it seems a long time ago now, all that was strained to, and beyond, breaking during the wars which consumed Yugoslavia as it disintegrated in the early and mid 1990s. Sarajevo, as the capital of the republic with the greatest ethnic diversity, and with by far the largest muslim population of the core republics which made up Yugoslavia, became the nexus of a series of power struggles over independence and control. For those within it that war was not simply a war to prevent an occupying power from taking over. It was a war which ripped apart the sinews of the city, house by house, neighbor by neighbor, family by family. The difference in Sarajevo was that, unlike so many other parts of the Republic, Sarajevans kept trying to preserve the common identity of being just that -- a Sarajevan. They tried to hold onto what was best, not what was worst, in us, and they did so under sniper fire from former neighbors who now nestled into the houses in the hills with rifles, picking people off as they cued for bread, or ran for water. They did so under mortar fire which devastated entire crowds standing in line for bread. They did so when a walk by the river in the fog was the only safe time to step outside. 

If you're looking for a bit of symbolism about what sort of city Sarajevo was and is, look to the treasure of the National Library. The Library held 1.5 million volumes and was the repository of a history of intellect, wisdom, inquiry and identity. In 1992, as a part of a systematic campaign to wipe out the common history of the Republic, Serb national forces hit it with incendiary grenades, setting it on fire. Instead of watching it burn, Sarajevans cued up and formed a fire line, hauling everything they could save out of the building -- a book, a manuscript, a paper at a time. All under sniper fire from the hills which took the life of one of the librarians. The death of knowledge, and of common history, was very much on the minds of the Serbian nationalists. 

The picture above is of a cellist from the Sarajevo Opera and Sarajevo Philharmonic. His name is Vedran Smailovic. Mr. Smailovic became a symbol of courage and passion in Sarajevo by playing at funerals and in public spaces in the heart of the seige of Sarajevo. Music was a healing tool. His cello was his rifle, and he used it in ways that resonate every day there still. After the fires had finally gone out in the National Library, he played there, atop the rubble. 

It is unclear to me whether dance can ever suggest the depth of what we experienced in Sarajevo. Perhaps in more capable hands than mine. But Han, the dance, is a reflection on Han the word and Han the life of a people who have endured.