The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU

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The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU

The Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU is an international institute for scholars and artists of ballet and its related arts and sciences.

01/16/2025

Meet Constantina Theofanopoulou, a neuroscientist, flamenco dancer, and 2024-2025 CBA fellow! Theofanopoulou is the Herbert and Nell Singer Research Assistant Professor at Rockefeller University, a Research Associate at Emory University and the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, and a Visiting Scholar at the Jameel Arts & Health Lab at New York University. Her research aims to understand the neural circuits of complex sensory-motor behaviors that serve social communication, specifically speech and dance, and to identify effective dance-based interventions for a wide range of brain disorders.

At CBA, Theofanopoulou will implement her innovative mobile electroencephalography (EEG) protocol across various dance genres. This technology allows her to capture brain activity from dancers and create real-time artistic visualizations of their brain waves for live audiences. She will also deepen her research into the behavioral and neural effects of dance-based interventions for Parkinson’s Disease.

Photo credit: Joe Carrotta (slides 1, 2, 4)
Percussionist: Albert M. Sanchez (slide 4)

01/13/2025

Meet Shamel Pitts, an artist, choreographer, and 2024-2025 CBA fellow! Pitts is a 2024 MacArthur Fellow and the founder and Artistic Director of TRIBE, a multidisciplinary arts collective based in Brooklyn. TRIBE’s mission is to cultivate space to create a platform for artists—particularly, artists of color—inspired by the Afrofuturism movement. With TRIBE, Pitts has created a triptych of award-winning multidisciplinary performances, known as his “BLACK series,” which has toured extensively to many festivals and performance spaces around the world since 2016.

At CBA, Pitts plans to continue discovering his practice of embodied movement, dance, choreography, and multidisciplinary performance art as well as exploring his roles as artistic director and teacher.

Photo credit: Joe Carrotta (slide 1), Rachel Keane (slide 2, 4)

01/09/2025

Meet Deborah Damast, a scholar, educator, and 2024-2025 CBA fellow! Damast is a Clinical Associate Professor and Director of the Dance Education Program at NYU Steinhardt. She has taught modern dance techniques, pedagogy, creative movement for children, production, and choreography. She is also the artistic director of Dance Concerts, Kaleidoscope Dancers, and the study abroad program in Uganda.

At CBA, Damast plans to develop an embodied practice informed by dance education, leadership, and women's studies to identify movement skills and concepts that can be employed to enhance leadership. She hopes that the research that comes out of her CBA fellowship will impact the fields of dance education, leadership studies, and childhood education and will provide concrete strategies for developing leadership skills across the age spectrum.

Photo credit: Joe Carrotta (slide 1), Jaqlin Medlock (slide 2)

01/09/2025

Join us for "Death Dances," a lecture with art historian and filmmaker Joseph Leo Koerner, on February 4 at 6 PM in the CBA studio. Koerner will consider intersections between the histories of art and dance, focussing on the paradigm of the Dance of Death. Be sure to get a free ticket here:
eventbrite.com/e/in-person-death-dances-with-joseph-koerner-harvard-university-tickets-1115820512189

12/10/2024

Meet Haley Winegarden Murphree, a dancer, choreographer, and 2024-2025 CBA fellow! Murphree is a graduate of the Juilliard School and has performed works by Justin Peck, Ohad Naharin, James Whiteside, Sonya Tayeh, Donald McKayle, and Amy Hall Garner, among others. Murphree has worked as a choreographer with Orlando Ballet II, Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, Nevada Ballet Theatre, and the Alabama School of Fine Arts. She was awarded the 2022 Kaatsbaan Playing Field Choreography Award and the Héctor Zaraspe Prize, awarded to a senior at Juilliard who has shown outstanding development as a choreographer. In December 2023, she made her debut at the Joyce Theater in Dancing with Glass: The Piano Etudes.

At CBA, Murphree aims to expand the traditional structure of an evening-length ballet while staying true to its form. She looks forward to exploring musical intricacies and pushing the athletic form of the ballet language.

Photo credit: Joe Carrotta (slide 1), Zachary Burrows (slide 2)

12/05/2024

Check out Big Dance Theatre's collection of essays by working choreographers, "Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study." Authored by twelve diverse American dance artists in the form of twelve small booklets, the collection includes essays by two CBA alumni fellows, Annie-B Parson (CBA '18) and Ogemdi Ude (CBA '20). This book interrogates the history of dance from the subjective, poetic perspective of a choreographer.

Co-editors: Annie-B Parson (CBA '18) and Thomas F. Defrantz
Project Director: Sara Pereira da Silva
Managing Editors: Karen Kelly and Barbara Shroeder
Design: Omnivore, Inc.

You can buy a copy at bigdancetheatre.org!

12/03/2024

Meet choreographer, educator, and 2024-2025 CBA fellow Michele Byrd-McPhee! A 2023 Bessie Award winner for Outstanding Service to the Field, Michele Byrd-McPhee is the Creator and Executive Director of Ladies of Hip-Hop (LOHH). Her work situates Black dance forms, theories, dance techniques, and the value of lived artistic experience in spaces that honor and acknowledge cultural roots along with the many creative pioneers who have shaped them. Awarded the 2020 Integrated Arts Residency Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Byrd-McPhee has also served as a grant panelist for the prestigious McKnight Foundation, DanceNYC, and served as a voting member of the Bessie Award Committee.

At CBA, Byrd-McPhee will continue developing the Black Dancing Bodies Project, an initiative to uplift and celebrate Black women in street and club dance culture. This project aims to address the erasure, miscoding, and often intentional exclusion of Black women’s work and voices. BDB has embarked on the journey to collect, preserve, and tell the stories of these women through dance works, interviews, and photo documentation; presented from stage to the streets.

Photo credit: Joe Carrotta

11/21/2024

Earlier this month, the Center for the Humanities and the Center for Ballet and the Arts hosted a compelling conversation with music critic and historian Jeremy Eichler, music scholar Michael Beckerman, Center for Humanities Director Uli Baer, and CBA Director Jennifer Homans centered around Eichler’s acclaimed book "Time’s Echo." The discussion explored the themes of memory, music, and war, highlighting the profound ways these forces shape our understanding of history. Audiences also enjoyed a reading from Eichler's book.

Thank you to all who joined us for this engaging event, and to Jeremy Eichler for sharing his invaluable insights. Keep an eye out for a recording of the event on our YouTube channel!

Photo credit: Joe Carrotta

11/18/2024

Meet Phil Chan, a writer, choreographer, and 2024-2025 CBA fellow! Chan is the co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface and President of the Gold Standard Arts Foundation. A graduate of Carleton College and an alumnus of the Ailey School, Chan is the author of Final Bow for Yellowface and Banishing Orientalism. He has held fellowships with Dance/USA, Drexel University, Jacob’s Pillow, Harvard University, the Manhattan School of Music, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, NYU, and the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art in Paris. His recent projects include directing “Madama Butterfly” for Boston Lyric Opera and staging a newly reimagined “La Bayadere” for Indiana University.

At CBA, Chan will be working on an Asian American Pipeline Study with the Gold Standard Arts Foundation. He will look at structures that build equity and opportunities for underrepresented groups in ballet and its related disciplines. This study in conjunction with Drexel University and Brigham Young University will examine what building resources and opportunities looks like in practice in the dance world.

Photo credit: Joe Carrotta (slide 1)

11/11/2024

Our event last month, "Afternoon of a Faun: Modern Art and Ballet in Fin-de-siècle Paris," centered on Vaslav Nijinsky’s famous ballet Afternoon of a Faun and its legacy, which exemplifies the burgeoning modern art and culture scene of fin-de-siècle Paris that enchanted pioneering modern art dealer Berthe Weill and supplied her gallery with colorful advertising illustrations.

This event co-sponsored with the Grey Art Museum featured remarks from GAM Director Lynn Gumpert, Professor of Art History Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, and CBA Director Jennifer Homans. Audience members also enjoyed a performance of Jerome Robbins' interpretation of Afternoon of a Faun, danced by NYC Ballet Principal Dancers Tiler Peck (CBA '24) and Roman Mejia, with Elaine Chelton as the pianist.

Keep an eye out for the recording of this event on our YouTube channel!

Photo credit: Joe Carrotta

11/07/2024

Today, we are looking back on an event from March 2024, "Transcending Gender and Self in Odissi Dance: Talk and Performance by Bijayini Satpathy." Dancer Bijayini Satpathy (CBA '24) took us on a journey of transformations through performed excerpts from Odissi dance. The Indian Classical Dance Odissi strives to transcend gender norms and embrace an egoless state of mind.

Satpathy reflected on gender conventions in Odissi and on the freedoms, limits, and paradoxes they pose in her own work in conversation with Jennifer Homans, Founder and Director of CBA, and Anurima Banerji, Associate Professor of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA.

You can watch the recording of the event at this link or at the link in our bio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L47EsSKqeU

Photo credit: Joe Carrotta

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https://balletcenter.nyu.edu/

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