Moving On

BY BYRON WOODS arts@indyweek.com

It’s the day before the 2023 season opens, and the numbers are looking good at the American Dance Festival. Ticket sales are up 80 percent compared to this time last year, and enrollment is clearly on the rebound at its three summer intensives for professional and pre-professional students, following a 45 percent drop in 2022, the first season the festival returned to live classes and performances after the start of the pandemic.

Executive Director Jodee Nimerichter is optimistic and excited about the broadened artistic bandwidth among the 20 shows she’s curated for the season and the 13 new works the festival has commissioned for it.

This week alone, swing dance to live jumping jazz returns when SW!NG OUT takes Page Auditorium (June 15-16), after flashy movers on a serpentine catwalk execute a slow pan across a landscape of mindless consumerism in Mark Haim’s roast, This Land Is Your Land, at the Nasher Museum (June 14). After both of those, a quintet of modern North Carolina choreographers share new ADF-commissioned works Saturday night in Reynolds Industries Theater.

During the season, modern dance evergreens like Pilobolus (June 23-24) and the Paul Taylor Dance Company (July 14-15) will make predictable dates, alongside ava- tars including Bill T. Jones (June 29-30) and Rennie Harris, who received this year’s ADF/Scripps lifetime achievement award and a $50,000 honorarium before his company’s performance last Friday night.

Still, all told, one-third of the companies and choreographers on the ADF’s main stages will mark their first appearances at this year’s festival.

And that is a significant—and not entirely calculable—risk for a live arts producer in an industry still seeking a sure footing after COVID-19 curtailed almost all live events for two years across the globe.

Though dance and theater companies including Aspen Santa Fe Ballet and Paul Taylor offshoot Taylor 2 folded during the lockdown, regional and national performing arts companies of all sizes have stumbled since it has lifted. In December, New York’s Metropolitan Opera unexpectedly announced sizable reductions in its season and its endowment. This spring, Greensboro’s Triad Stage canceled productions and paused operations before a warehouse sale and giveaway of props, set pieces, and costumes in April. Last week, after asking for $2.5 million in January to save its season, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced it needed an additional $7.3 mil- lion to finish the year.

Still, robust preseason ticket sales and other cultural markers give Nimerichter confidence. “Clearly people are feeling more comfortable coming back into the theater,” she observes. “People want to dance; they want to be a part of that community. And they’re coming back.”

But how many of them ultimately do, and what their impact is on last-minute ticket sales and season revenues, can’t be quantified at this point.

“Most of our income and expenses happen in the next two months,” Nimerichter says. “We don’t know how we’re doing until we get through the season.”

“Will this summer, whatever it is, be the new normal?” she asks. “Will we need another year to tell?”

At this point no one knows, but Nimerichter says she’s keeping a weather eye on world economics.

With that said, a number of the festival’s artists are taking on conspicuously high-profile, and potentially high-risk, targets this year, literally embodying in their creations plangent commitments to social justice. Last week, BODYTRAFFIC opened the festival’s first night with The One to Stay With, a work about the Sack-

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ler family and corporate corruption in the opioid crisis. Since choreographer and trans rights activist Sean Dorsey received his commission last year to create The Lost Art of Dreaming, which a quintet of trans, queer, and gender-nonconforming dancers will perform (July 13, Reynolds Theater), 20 conservative-led states have passed laws aimed at restricting transgender rights; 10 such laws are currently pending in our state legislature.

In a new 10-minute dance documentary that won an Emmy award last week, Dorsey counters that dreaming is a political act and a vehicle for resistance and cultural change. “Trans and gender-nonconforming folks and queer people have a glorious place in the future …. We cannot forge the change we want to see in the world without dreaming of it first.”

In an intriguing expression of zeitgeist, emigration across borders—and the disorientation and violence that can ensue there—figure into three separate works. In Zvi Gotheiner’s Migrations (July 18 & 20, von der Heyden Studio Theater) the transit patterns of birds mirror increasingly large-scale human movements due to wars and deprivation. The world premiere of Cara Hagan’s were we birds? (August 22, Nasher Museum) reflects on the dislocating experience of such travel as it asks, “When we manage to pull ourselves back together, what remains out of place? What was never in place to begin with?” And in staibdance’s autobiographical fence (July 1 & 2, von der Heyden Studio Theater), Atlanta-based choreographer George Staib recalls being the only native Iranian studying at the Tehran American School at the time two American students were murdered there in 1976. Staib found himself ostracized after his family fled to rural Pennsylvania, bullied in the aftermath of the Islamic revolution and the Iranian hostage crisis. In a chamber where shadow, smoke, and uncertain light curl around barricades of iron and chain link fence, dancers and audience look across the ever-shifting dividing lines between the protected and the Other, whose increasing contortions attempt to evade aversion and neglect. W

Burning Coal Second Stage

This summer, Burning Coal Theatre hosts two independent company productions and a recently arrived solo artist in rotating rep for its Second Stage series.

THE FACE OF EMMETT TILL

Pure Life Theatre | June 14, 15, 17

Mamie Till-Mobley was a woman of uncommon nerve and courage. After her son, Emmett, was lynched outside Money, Mississippi, in August 1955, she insisted upon an open-casket funeral so the world could witness how white supremacists had desecrated his body. Still, she never felt that others had told the whole story of Emmett’s life, death, and legacy. Collaborating with playwright David Barr III, Till-Mobley also detailed her behind-the-scenes struggles with civil rights organizations that were quick to capitalize upon Emmett’s death and quick to move on once the spotlight had turned. Tina Morris-Anderson, Verlene Oates, and John Ivey lead Pure Life Theatre’s production with indelible portrayals of grief and outrage at a historic tragedy.

OR, Switchyard Theatre | June 16-17, 23-25

The lively comic thriller behind the odd title (don’t forget the comma) whisks us off to England’s Restoration period, where Aphra Behn, the brilliant poet, autodidact, and spy for King Charles II, stands to make history as England’s first known female playwright—if, that is, she can get out of debtor’s prison. And if she can finish the script so the Duke’s Company has it in the morning to fill the disastrous gap in its season. Ryan and Kelly McDaniel keep the door slamming as interrupting lovers and others; stage veteran Laurel Ullman anchors proceedings as Behn.

RUBY Susan Gross | June 17-18

Our culture has never known what to do with the grief that women go through after a miscarriage. In her one-person show, stage and screen actor and playwright Susan Gross, a recent transplant from New York, plays a woman navigating treacherous emotional currents after losing a daughter (for whom the play is named). As she tries to find her bearings, her character finds herself ambushed by memories, desires, and encounters with moms and kids in parks and restaurants. Gross’s brave drama asks how a woman lives through that trauma, and what lies beyond.