(upbeat music) - Welcome to "Forum 360", with its global outlook and local view.

I'm Ardith Keck, Host, and we are featuring dance in Akron.

Now those of you in the know will say, but there's no dance company in Akron anymore.

You are correct.

But there is the National Center for Choreography in Akron.

And we are going to talk to Christy Bolingbroke, who is the Founding Executive Artistic Director of that center.

You say, I never heard of it, where is it?

And you might ask, what do they do?

We'll answer those questions and much more.

Welcome, Christy.

- Thank you Ardith.

I'm so excited to be here.

- Well, we have the first question, where is the center?

- Yes, we are one of two National Centers for Choreography, and in Akron, Ohio, we operate in donated space on the University of Akron's campus.

- Uh-huh.

Well, tell me more.

You recently won an award, so you're on the national radar.

Go ahead.

- Yeah, no, it's interesting.

I would say, you know, one of the first questions that I get from artists when they come through is, wait, why is this in Akron?

And so I will tell them about Heinz Poll, the former German figure skater turned choreographer, and Ohio Ballet, which had been the professional dance company in Akron for so many years.

And that history that we get to now dance in and operate in.

We were co-founded with three founding partners, organizations.

The University of Akron, which had built out Guzzetta Hall.

It always had a professional dance company on campus that had always been a part of it since the inception of a dance department on campus.

And so when Ohio Ballet closed at the first part of this century, that left a deep imprint for professional dance.

And then we have Dance Cleveland, which is one of the few remaining dance-only presenting organizations in the country.

Just 45 minutes north of Akron.

And present world class talent, five or six artists a year.

I think they're over 60, 65 years old.

They don't own their own space.

So they had started a relationship at the University of Akron where they would open their season in EJ Thomas Hall and offer a educational residency, where they would be at Guzzetta Hall.

The artists that they brought through would basically take over the curriculum for a week and at the end of the week they would do a performance.

So that was going on for a couple of years after Ohio Ballet closed.

And then the Knight Foundation, which you know, is all over Akron and a big reason the arts and culture can thrive as much as it is able to, really above and beyond so many other places that I've been.

And they're in Akron.

They had a champion in dance and asked, at the time it was Executive Director Pam Young at Dance Cleveland, if she had any big ideas for dance.

And she said, "Well, yeah," you know, at that point they only had one National Center for Choreography.

"I think it's time the US had a second one, and I think it could be here in Akron."

So, thrilled.

The Knight Foundation said, "Great.

What's a National center for Choreography?"

So our mission is actually to be a research and development space and a catalyst for the future of dance in this country.

And that gives us so much room to play.

So we don't put on shows, we don't sell tickets, we get to support artists in their process.

We get to host them in a university, an urban research university environment like the University of Akron to explore, to not have all of the answers figured out, and just be able to come in and ask questions and support them along the way in their process, whether they're making dance about cultural identity or immigration or race issues or social justice, or trying to understand the relationship between music and dance, which are these sort of big age-old questions that have perpetuated the field.

- So University of Akron's students take classes with you?

- The students and the program continue to run on their own.

We are a separate nonprofit organization.

And so I have made it clear to the university and to the artists that we work with, not all artists are great teachers and not all teachers are necessarily choreographers.

So when we work with choreographers and I'll bring them in and say, do you have a teaching practice?

And some of them, we had Ashwini Ramaswamy a couple years ago who is classically trained in Bharatanatyam dance.

This is a southeast Asian classical dance form.

She has spent her entire life coming in, you know, she knew the curriculum did not have Bharatanatyam in it, but she said there are certain principles, rituals, of Bharatanatyam dance.

And so she was interested in, could she practice those rituals with differently trained dancers?

And our students said yes, 'cause this thing gives them a different perspective on their own training and possibilities too.

- Do the students get credit for what they do with you?

- They don't get credit.

Sometimes we are able to work our way into a pre-existing class.

That's usually the best way to secure engagement, because everyone's so busy now.

So if they already have their ballet class which is five days a week or their modern class which is three days a week, we'll try to drop in the guest artists during those regularly scheduled classes so that it's really working in tandem with their existing program.

- So that answers the question, how do they learn about you?

That's part of it.

- Yes, that's part of it.

And then we're interested not only in talking just to dance students, but I believe as a National Center for Choreography, we are here to support the artists, but we also need to be an advocate for the art form.

I think that dance and the creative practice process is a central part of culture in this country.

And so when we can open up a conversation, that could be through our public speaking series, that's also a podcast inside the dancer studio, we will open those up not only to the students but to anyone on or off campus that wants to hear, how do they name things?

What do they do when they reach a sort of creative rut or something and need to find a way to get out of it?

Which is very relatable.

You may not be making a dance, but we've all faced a deadline.

- We have photographs.

And because of the radio part of this program, we're gonna talk through them.

So we have a photo of students on a grassy area.

What are they doing?

- Yes.

So I like to think that NCC Akron is not just on campus, but we are a bridge between the university community and the surrounding community.

So this was a moment where in one of our artists, Kate Wallich, who had created her own dance form called Dance Church.

And this is made for you and me art, this is based and it's marketed as the dance club you wish you had been at the night before.

It is follow the leader.

It is a large body positive, movement positive.

The one rule is that you just have nonstop movement for 90 minutes.

And so we took that out into Cascade Plaza in downtown Akron and she offered a class in the round.

This was back in the summer of '22.

And we had music.

And everything, she guides us from standing up, from moving around in a circle.

There is no front.

It really is, one of the best things about dance is being able to move with your neighbor, to be in community together.

So Kate has been doing Dance Church for some time now.

She originated it in Seattle.

During the pandemic, they immediately took it online.

They had their own bubble.

They had two or three people, multi-camera shoots.

And all of a sudden they had thousands of people from all over the world tuning in.

And so Kate's program, Dance Church, is also related to the award that you alluded to.

We recently received a renewed grant of $1 million from the Andrew Mellon Foundation for our creative admin research program.

So I knew I'd get there.

(laughing) - Yeah, very good.

And the second photo is screen dance on a boardwalk.

And that, I assume, is another story.

- Well, some may recognize that as the floating bridge in Summit Lake, it's where the Kenmore Boulevard overpass is, so if you continue on the Towpath Trail walking or biking.

We went out and made dance films there in the summer of 2018.

And this was something that came up from working with the San Francisco Dance Film Festival.

They had a program just for Bay Area dance makers, where they would pair choreographers with film directors and say, you have two, three days make a film.

It can be five minutes in length.

So we did that here in Akron with support from the Akron Civic Commons to be able to highlight different parts of Akron.

And also supporting artists who maybe, well, let me say dance artists are scrappy.

We'll find a way to make it happen for sure.

But we were trying to let them know like, you don't have to do it all by yourself.

You don't have to shoot it on your iPhone and edit it yourself.

What if you have the space to actually understand the medium of film?

And then we paired them with a filmmaker and with a full production crew.

RedPoint Digital worked with us from there in Akron.

And they were able to storyboard out their films and be able to explore all along the Towpath Trail.

And so they had 10 days on the ground, three days to get to know each other, one day of rehearsal, two days of filming, one day of rest, and then two days of post-production.

And we had two five minute films.

- Fantastic.

- Oh my goodness, it was like its own reality show.

It was so fantastic.

And then there was something that was interesting and related back to our creative admin research thinking and programming.

So we aren't just making dance or art for art's sake.

But also the idea that there isn't one way of making dances so there shouldn't be just one way of doing dance business.

And when I think about the economics of making a work for the stage, there is a estimate that for every minute you see on stage, that is at least eight hours of rehearsal in the studio.

That in itself, you know, like we're not making widgets.

You can't make it any faster.

(laughing) The muscles need that time, the body needs that time.

A lot of time artists make work, I had one artist who made 40 minutes of material, when I saw the finished piece, maybe 15 minutes of that original 40 was actually in the finished work.

So that's what the creative process, it's not linear, you need some time to draft and then to sort of whittle away.

And then sometimes it only gets performed for two nights only, you know, at the Akron Civic Theater or the Knight Stage and never to be seen again.

The premise with making film, and I'm not saying everyone should make film, but we believe that choreographers could make a choice if they like making dance films, they could put the same amount of work, the same amount of money into making a film, and it could be shown in 24 cities at different film festivals because you don't have to travel with your whole cast from city to city to city.

Because film, you know, it can travel better a little bit.

Or now also we can put things online too.

- The students, I was going to ask that they don't actually perform in Akron, but they do perform for a film, and that is satisfying.

- Whether it's for a film, I would say that the students have different types of opportunities depending on what the artists are interested in.

And we're constantly talking about this.

We're only eight years old so there is no, oh, we've always done it this way.

'Cause we're always going, oh it's working.

We work with the students, they get maybe experiences 20 times a year on average between NCC Akron artists and their own education.

How could we make it better?

So for example, this year they were very interested in not only performing faculty work in their spring concert, but their faculty came and said, could some of your visiting artists set a work on our students?

And so Dance Heginbotham, John Heginbotham is the choreographer out of New York.

He recently did the revival of "Oklahoma" that was on Broadway.

He also did the cheeky "Footloose" opening on season three of "The Umbrella Academy", if you have any Netflix fans out there.

And he had another work to a jazz pianist, Ethan Iverson's original score.

And so the students have learned that and will perform it, while at the same time John came through and he made two films of his own.

That's part of a different film series that he's creating as well.

So when they can really be in residence here, it's reciprocal in so many ways, both for the artist's benefit and our community members.

- We're talking today about the National Center for Choreography in Akron.

And we're talking with Christy Bolingbroke who is the Founding Executive Artistic Director of the center.

And so it's dance in Akron.

Where do you find these choreographers?

- Hmm.

I have to tell you, it is so humbling.

My own experience, I was a trained ballet dancer, a jazz dancer growing up.

I was a competition dancer growing up in Texas.

My own undergraduate degree is in dance.

And then I've worked in this field for 20 years.

We try to do one opportunity a year by open application so that we're sort of demystifying the idea of sort of kingmaking, you know, what arts patronage used to be 100 years ago.

It was about who you know and just getting in with the right person.

And every time we do an open application, I am humbled by how many new-to-me artists come through.

There are so many dance makers out in the world these days, which gives me excited hope, but also the responsibility of what this is as well.

So we have a couple of different rubrics in our curatorial values.

We are looking for those that are maybe the future standard bearers that the up and coming artists are gonna be like, oh, I'm so excited about that Kyle Abraham, who is a younger dance maker who's won all of the awards at this time, still in his early 40s, and in a really exciting way being able to move forward.

So we look at that to see like, who is making exciting work?

We also are interested in consciously working against our history and not only working with artists from New York.

This is not just a one-way street between New York and Akron.

And so geographic reach is another one of our curatorial values.

And I'm particularly proud with the Creative Admin Research Program.

We had 22 teams to date and they represent 19 different states.

So to be able to say dance is- not only are there so many dance makers, but dance is happening everywhere is a really big deal for us.

So all of our practices are often not only that local bridge I was talking about between the university and the immediate community, we're also looking at the national reach to be able to spread out.

So I will do listening tours where we go into cities, we ask other venues or foundations to put together a focus group with up to eight artists that they think should know about NCC Akron and vice versa, we should know about them.

And we test out what we think we know about dance making, how is it the same in Charlotte, North Carolina versus Seattle, Washington?

How is it different?

And that gives us more information about the types of events and activities that we program.

And then I will also say like with the screen dance films that we talked about in that one picture, one of the things we try to do is disrupt the sort of lottery system of support.

If we only did five residencies a year, it's like winning the lottery.

You five get a residency.

But when there's so many artists, what does that mean for them next year?

'Cause we wanna keep rotating over and over.

So we've designed some programs that operate more as a think tank, and it's about connecting people.

They may think they're the only hip hop street dance artist working on a specific idea.

And they're in San Francisco and we'll put them in touch with someone in Pittsburgh or in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and have them come together in Akron for a magical experience to get to exchange knowledge.

It's what I call sort of harvesting dandelions, at the end of the week we blow and they all go back to their home communities, fortified by the experiences that they had here in Summit County.

- On average, how many teachers, choreographers do you bring in?

- We work with 150 to 180 artists a year.

And it is that group sensibility, the multiplicity of experiences that enables us to speak to that kind of volume.

Because we may be young, but we were looking to make a big impact very quickly.

- Where is the other center in the country?

- It's in Tallahassee, Florida.

And it is a part of Florida State University.

And I believe that it's just shy of 20 years old.

So it's still pretty young.

National Centers for Choreography in general have been used by other international countries.

France has 19, for example.

But ballet was also a tool of propaganda and was state invested as far as the amount of federal support that's going into the arts there.

The difference here in the US with 501c3's, and yes, we get some federal or state support from the Ohio Arts Council or when we apply for grants with the National Endowment for the Arts.

But from my experience, most of the arts organizations I've worked at, at least in dance, maybe only get 67% of their budgets from government support.

And that remains true also for NCC Akron.

- Let's talk about the other photos that we have.

We have two dancers who are appearing to fight with musicians in the background.

- Yes, this is a picture of Dominic Moore-Dunson, who is an Akron native and a freelance choreographer who works and develops his own work in addition to doing other leadership and speaking engagements.

We co-commissioned this early work called inCOPnegro.

And this was something that he started in late 2020.

He, as an African American man, was newly married and about to become a father for the first time.

And so he was really interested, I would say, Dom's own movement aesthetic is urban midwest storytelling.

And the movement is very idiosyncratic in finding his own way, sometimes incorporates text, not all dance incorporates speaking.

And he was very interested also in original music.

And so he put together an all African-American cast, a Black cast, including musicians and dancers and original music, to really talk about, this was before the death of Jayland Walker in the following summer.

And so as the premier of inCOPnegro didn't happen until just this past summer in 2023, it really morphed into becoming not just what does he say to his, you know, upcoming child, now he has two young kids, about how to stay safe in the world, to what does it mean to be Black or brown and also blue if you identify with one of the police forces, to then how does a community heal and come together after tremendous trauma and strife, you know, especially around violence and race.

And he really explored with Chris Coles on the saxophone, with Floco Torres as the hip hop artist and MC, and then Kevin Parker as his fellow dancer to build out this community, this world.

And the piece looks like they're fighting, because they're also struggling.

But the dynamic was also interesting 'cause he really wanted it to be in the round.

There was no front, right?

Whereas when we go to the movie theater or a large auditorium, there's a proscenium.

That's a front, just like a TV, watching at home.

And that's definitely an exciting trend.

That's not new in dance, but something I think the more technologically driven we get as a society, it feels like more and more dancers want to get more intimate with their audiences and experiences, to be able to be a part of the action.

Not saying we're gonna ask you to dance, not all the time, but to actually feel what they're feeling.

And I can say firsthand from the experience of when inCOPnegro aftermath premiered at the CATAC, the Balch Street Theater in West Akron, we should have handed out Kleenex.

Like just the catharsis, the tears, there wasn't a dry eye in the house.

- Thank you, Christy Bolingbroke, for joining us today.

Thank you for explaining dance in Akron and giving us more information about what happens in Akron.

That's it for "Forum 360, Global Outlook and Local View".

I'm Ardith Keck.

- [Narrator] "Forum 360" is brought to you by John S and James L Knight Foundation, the Akron Community Foundation, Hudson Community Television, the Rubber City Radio Group, Shaw Jewish Community Center of Akron, Blue Green, Electric Impulse Communications, and Forum 360 supporters.