Dance festival

Bates Dance Festival receives two grants totaling $190,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts | News

By Gerard S. Floyd

The National Endowment for the Arts has announced two major awards at the Bates Dance Festival, including a $150,000 American Rescue Plan award designed to help the festival recover from the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The second prize of $40,000 is for general support of the festival, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, and will be used to support artists.

Shoshona Currier directs the Bates Dance Festival. (Photograph by Heidi Kirn)

The $150,000 prize is part of a nearly $58 million aid package that the NEA distributes to 567 arts organizations nationwide. All recipients can use the funding to save jobs, fund operations and facilities, buy health and safety supplies, or use the money to fund marketing and promotional efforts to encourage attendance and participation.

Bates Dance Festival director Shoshona Currier said the American Rescue Plan award would be invaluable as they prepare for the summer festival. Currier learned about the $40,000 grant earlier in January. It is one of 15 awards, totaling $265,000, awarded to Maine bands by the NEA.

Nationally, more than 1,800 organizations have applied for these grants. Currier said the funds will be used for artists’ fees for performances this summer. Some of the artists at the upcoming festival had originally planned projects for 2020 which were postponed due to the pandemic.

“This recognition by the National Endowment for the Arts is welcome and well deserved,” said President Clayton Spencer. “Shoni has provided leadership for the Bates Dance Festival which has been artistically creative and inspired, and remarkably pragmatic in adapting to the difficult realities of producing live shows during the pandemic. This funding is especially timely as we look forward to bringing the in-person festival back to campus this summer, with exciting and varied programs for dance students, performing artists and audiences.

Appearing in the photographs are Justin Moriarity, technical director of the theater and dance department at Bates, who serves as the BDF's production manager, and psychology major Jamarhi Amrham '22 of Fontana, Calif., who is doing an internship at the BDF this summer.EMILY JOHNSON/CATALYSTProcessions Toward, Being Future Beingwork-in-progressJuly 17-18, 6:00 p.m.Kennedy ParkEmily Johnson/Catalyst's newest work in development, Being Future Being explores the power of creation to construct a visual, aural and ancestral aboriginal power. With a new soundtrack commissioned by Raven Chacon and a cast of more-than-human creatures, this work in progress connects audiences to the land and imagines new ways of being together. By (re)constructing new visions of the forces that gave birth to this world, Johnson offers new futures that can reshape our relationship to ourselves and to the human and more-than-human co-inhabitants of our world. BDF audiences will make the experience of a work in progress of an exterior section of this work which is still in development. Audiences will pass through areas of downtown Lewiston throughout this play. Please do not bring blankets and chairs. Only bring what you are comfortable wearing. For accessibility issues, please contact bdfboxoffice@bates.edu Emily Johnson is an artist who does body work. She is a protector of land and water and an activist for justice, sovereignty and well-being. Emily is a Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim and United States Artists Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award. She is based in Lenapehoking/New York. Emily is from the Yup'ik nation and since 1998 has created work that considers the experience of feeling and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and healing processions, they engage the audience in and through space, time and environment – ​​interacting with architecture, people, history and the role of a place. in building the future
Creativity was the watchword at last summer’s pandemic-altered Bates Dance Festival, which featured alternative venues, indoors and outdoors, due to pandemic restrictions. During a rehearsal last July for a performance of a work in development, To be to be future, in Kennedy Park, choreographer Emily Johnson works with a dancer wrapped in pigtails. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

Currier, who took over as festival director in 2017 after longtime director Laura Faure retired, also noted how vulnerable performers were to setbacks from the pandemic. “This pandemic has been especially cruel to artists, gig workers and so many essential participants in our creative industries,” Currier said. “Relief funding for organizations is so critical to creating stability on the ground in the future. And hopefully we’ve learned from those years and create better systems than what was in place before.

After a canceled 2020 season, the festival – with limits on the number of students and performances – returned in 2021. Currier put his creativity to good use, offering alternative venues, indoors and outdoors, to accommodate visitation restrictions on the Bates campus. She turned the side of the Schaeffer Theater into a movie screen to show movies outside. For a performance by land and water protector and justice campaigner Emily Johnson, Currier turned to Kennedy Park in Lewiston.

A interactive video editing at L/A Arts Gallery invited participants, one at a time, for 20-minute interactions. At the Simard Payne Park Amphitheatre, live salsa music inspired audience members to dance and also served as a venue for Vanessa Anspaugh’s interactive audience performance related to climate change “A funeral for the ocean.”

Artists and dancers “constantly adapted” last summer, said BDF director Shoni Currier, offering a “testimony to what can happen within creative practice in the most desperate of situations.” Here viewers sat on College Street – helpfully closed for the occasion – to see a film, Communion, projected on a screen under the porch of the Schaeffer Theater. The film was created during the height of the pandemic lockdown by Janessa Clark, who asked each of the 40 dancers to submit a video of themselves dancing. Each video was then combined with another dancer’s video to create 20 “distanced duets”. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College)

The festival has also commissioned writings from dancers, to provide opportunities while theaters are closed. The next season of The impossible future, an anthology curated by choreographer Raja Feather Kelly for the Bates Dance Festival, will be released this month. The anthology was a project born out of the pandemic, intended to engage dancers while they were physically apart. It features 16 artists responding to prompts in essays, interviews, or other prose over the course of a year.

“We will continue outdoor events and writing projects and find multiple ways to support artists,” Currier said. “But our hope is that we will be mostly back on campus in 2022, where the festival started. Whatever happens, this funding from the NEA will make all the difference. I think it’s safe to say we’re all dancing with joy — and relief — about it.

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Gerard S. Floyd
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