On The Boards Secures Funding To Launch OtBTV Lane Czaplinski, Artistic Director of the Seattle-based presenter On The Boards (OtB), secured the funding to launch OtBTV, an online programming series of full-length, high-definition contemporary dance, made available on a pay-per-view basis. One half of the profits will be given to the artists. His plan is to shoot six to eight shows a year, with four to five HD cameras, over a four year period. Venues will range from PS 122 in New York to On the Boards. His curatorial slant is to choose contemporary dance companies that make statements with both relevance and meaning. Their launch in January, 2010 will feature Tanja Liedtke and Jan Fabre. They also have plans to film Argentine choreographer Diana Szeinblum when she performs at OtB in November. Czaplinski, who worked at Brooklyn Academy of Music for three years before going out to Seattle, won his first $750,000 for the project from the Wallace Foundation. Co-founder Lila Wallace was convinced that “The arts belong to everyone.” The core goal of two decades of The Wallace Foundation’s work in the arts is to support effective, innovative ideas and practices that bring the benefits and pleasures of the arts to more people, especially adults and children who might never otherwise experience them. Another $130,277 ($101,111 project support plus $29,165 core operating support) came from the Engaging Dance Audiences (EDA) program. Nine organizations were awarded funding by Engaging Dance Audiences, the first national funding program and related study of audience engagement practices focused specifically on the art form of dance. EDA was established through the generosity of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation. Out of a rigorous national review of 179 idea submissions, 34 were invited to submit full applications, from which nine were selected by a national panel. Engaging Dance Audiences is a $1.9 million pilot program that enables Dance/USA to analyze current dance-going activities and its members to explore and research methods of engaging audiences for dance, learn from peers, and share the learning nationally. EDA was conceived of by Dance/USA in collaboration with the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which made a three-year, $1.5 million award. Additional support in the amount of $400,000 was granted from The James Irvine Foundation, targeted for the California component of the program. Misnomer Dance Theater, of Brooklyn, NY, also won $162,568 ($126,111 project support plus $36,457 core operating support) to help artists/companies adopt and utilize the web-based Audience Engagement Platform, which is designed to facilitate two-way interactions between dance audiences and artists. Funding will be used for beta-testing and training materials. Engaging Dance Audiences Panelists were: Cathy Edwards, Director of Performance Programs, New Haven Festival of Art and Ideas, New Haven, CT; Joanna Haigood, Artistic Director, Zaccho Dance Theatre, San Francisco, CA; Charles Helm, Director of Performing Arts, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Rebecca Krause-Hardie, Consultant, AudienceWorks, Royalston, MA; Tom Mossbrucker, Artistic Director, Aspen Santa Fe Ballet, Aspen, CO; Alyson Pou, Associate Director, Creative Capital, New York, NY; Jerry Yoshitomi, Independent Consultant, Port Hueneme, CA. Frederick Wiseman’s LA DANSE: THE PARIS OPERA BALLET LA DANSE shows how a ballet company functions from administration, technical support, and classes, to the rehearsal and/or performance of Paquita by Pierre Lacotte, The Nutcracker by Rudolf Nureyev, Genus by Wayne McGregor, Medea by Angelin Preljocaj, The House of Bernarda Alba by Mats Ek, Romeo and Juliet by Sasha Waltz and Orpheus and Eurydyce by Pina Bausch. The film is a profile of all aspects of the ballet company, one of France’s principal cultural institutions. Fredrick Wiseman writes, “Since movies are about movement, I wanted to make a movie about a group of dancers and choreographers who represent the highest level of achievement in the conscious use of the body to express feeling and thought. I have great admiration for the dancers, choreographers, administrators, and technicians at the Paris Opera Ballet and welcomed this opportunity to film them at work.” Frederick Wiseman has made thirty-six documentaries and two fiction films. His documentaries are about the human experience within institutions (schools, prisons, the military, hospitals, courts, the arts, and communities) that are common in all societies. In 1995, he made BALLET, a profile of the American Ballet Theatre as it goes on tour, rehearsing in its New York studio and later performing in Athens and Copenhagen. His stage productions include Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days” and “The Last Letter,” which is based on the Vasily Grossman novel Life and Fate, both staged at the Comédie Française. Wiseman received a BA from Williams College and an LLB from Yale Law School.             MAO’S LAST DANCER Directed by Bruce Beresford The feature film MAO’S LAST DANCER was based on the Li Cunxi’s autobiography published by The Berkley Group, a division of Penguin Books in 2003. Funded by the peasant-turned-dancer-turned-stockbroker, the film stars Chi Cao, and female leads Amanda Schull (CENTER STAGE) and Camilla Vergotis, The $25 million production produced by Jane Scott (SHINE) and directed by Bruce Beresford (DRIVING MISS DAISY) was shot in Australia, China, and the US. It was the first runner up for the People’s Choice in the Toronto Film Festival 2009. Li’s childhood in Qingdao in Shandong province was spartan. Communist China provided few frills and some odd oportunities. Li was recruited by the Communists at age 11 to undertake the seven-year training regime at the Beijing Dance Academy. At that age, he had no interest in dance, nor any experience of ballet. But his improverished upbringing gave him the drive to excel. He became one of the first two cultural exchange students under Mao’s regime allowed to study in the US. Love got in his way of being a proper Chinese ambassador. He got married the day before his scheduled departure, in part hoping to use the marriage as a legal way to avoid returning to China. Those laws were recognized only the US, not by China. Despite the political storm that followed, Ben Stevenson, the artistic director of Houston Ballet invited Li to dance with the Houston Ballet Company for 16 years. After his second marriage to Australian-born ballerina Mary McKendry, he moved moved to Melbourne in 1995. The book, Mao’s Last Dancer, is a fascinating view of the Cultural Revolution with his family mulling through a life without running water, electricity, working toilets, or satisfying diet. Li’s childhood seems sweet and contained with little amusements beyond catching crickets and flying kites. Though the writing is hampered by cloying phrases and predictable characterizations, it’s a gribbing, fast read. New Publication From Oslo The Oslo School of Architecture and Design and Dance Information Norway launch ‘Program to Perform – Exploring Dance and New Media.’ The publication is a collection of texts written by internationally established researchers and practitioners in the field of dance, interaction design, fine art and music: Johannes Birringer, Amanda Steggell, Åsa Unander- Scharin, Gislaine Boddington, Anthony Rowe, Stuart Jones, Georg Hobmeier og Marie-Claude Poulin. Editors are Ine Therese Berg, MA Theatre Studies, Project Manager and Curator, ke∂jaOslo and Lise Amy Hansen MA RCA, PhD Research Fellow, Institute for Design, AHO. The publication is free. For more information contact Lise Amy Hansen / liseamy.hansen@aho.no or Ine Therese Berg / ine@danseinfo.no DANSE MACABRE wins Toronto 2009 Film Festival Best Short Film Prize by Kathryn Luckstone DANSE MACABRE is a masterfully crafted work on the physical and spiritual repercussions of death on the human form. Pedro Pires, making his directorial debut, collaborated with fellow Canadian Robert LaPage to create this visceral nine-minute film based on the medieval allegory that death unites us all. Lepage, a multidisciplinary artist who works in experimental theater, painting, dance, and film, is credited for the concept for this film developed under the auspices of the Phi Group, a Quebec arts collective. The film begins with an eerily inviting shot of an empty public bathroom with a hallway dividing the orderly sinks and mirrors that leads to complete blackness. Light and darkness provide visually compelling images throughout the film. Pires uses two environments, an abandoned church and a morgue, to merge natural and synthetic sounds and materials seamlessly into the storytelling. The filmmakers describe their film, which will be shown in DFA’s Dance on Camera Festival, thus: “For a period of time, while we believe it to be perfectly still, lifeless flesh responds, stirs and contorts in a final macabre ballet. Are these spasms merely erratic motions or do they echo the chaotic twists and turns of a past life?” The Toronto Film Festival described this film as ” exquisitely photographed morbid ballet (that) pushes the traditional dance film to new cinematic heights. In haunting deserted spaces, the choreographed erratic motions of a corpse evoke the final spasms of life and a last struggle with the emotional turns of the past.” Pedro Pires is an award-winning visual-effects artist whose credits include the films THE RED VIOLIN (1998) and POSSIBLE WORLDS (2001). The performer and choreographer Anne Bruce Falconer is luminous. The most riveting moments of the film are the haunting dances performed by our deceased heroine. Her left arm and shoulder slung in a loop of rope hanging from the ceiling. Her weight in the rope causes her body to rotate steadily. In a slipdress, covered in filth, only her right foot makes contact with the metal examination table as the camera rotates counter clockwise around her torso, momentarily revealing the action taking place on a wooden stage. BEGUINE Douwe Dijkstra, Netherlands, 2009, 5min 2D Animation & Stopmotion: Douwe Dijkstra – 3D Animation: Tom Walter Music: Ferry Heijne (de Kift) – Production Manager: Nico de Haan This beguiling short will also be shown in DFA’s 2010 Festival, following the recommendation of Janine Dijkmeijer of Cinedans fame. A short movie that makes you smile and sigh with recognition, BEGUINE dashes from one image to the next, ever sillier and more illogical. For example, actions in the film include calmly shaving while plunging to a most certain demise and being sucked into the bottom of a copier. The director Douwe Dijkstra (1984) graduated from the Academy of Arts in Zwolle in the summer of 2005. In 2006 he helped start Festina Lente, a creative Amsterdam based network/agency. DANSE MACABRE and BEGUINE are only two of the many innovative dance film shorts to be featured in Dance on Camera Festival 2010 co-produced by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, National Endowment for the Arts, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, and the members of DFA.