While being an Artistic Fellow with Amy Sewiert's Imagery has been an incredible opportunity, re-wiring my brain to accept, trust, and embrace this generosity has been challenging. And I know, as a First-Generation BIPOC woman, this is not an uncommon experience. It is why having internal groups for inclusion, diversity, and ERGs are essential.

In the second part of the mini-series “Beyond the Equity Statement,” we share how we ensured that our newly articulated core values are integral to our day-to-day operations and embraced by everyone collaborating with ASI.

A mini-series on creating core values and living by them.

In 2020, when COVID-19 threatened our health and livelihood, and civil unrest forced us to reevaluate our privilege, we could no longer ignore the "brokenness" of our field and the art form we love. Developing equity statements was important, but for ASI, it was time to become outward-facing about our values and to live by them.

Like many nonprofits, we didn't have the resources to spend hours digging into these topics all at once. So, with grace (and privilege), we permitted ourselves to do this over time. Not to keep pushing this back on the to-do list, but by eating the elephant one bite at a time and making sure this work could go beyond a nicely designed piece of paper.

We hope this mini-series sharing our process will inspire others to create a culture of care within their organizations and put actions behind their equity statements.

Part I: Looking Inward, Crafting Our Vision Statement & Core Values

As I rewatched this piece, I was surprised by how fresh it remains in my mind and body. Some dances fade a bit from memory, but this one holds on. (…)I can still feel the sensations of this dance in my body, not only of the particular steps I danced, but also the bits and pieces I helped create, transfer, and reinhabit in my colleagues. This process of mutual transference and multiply-layered collaboration was new to me, rousing both discomfort and wonder, and at the time inspired me to write the piece that appears below. It’s a pleasure now to revisit both the joy of this dance and my reflections on its creation.

General etiquette tells us that interrupting someone is rude. However, sometimes interruptions can be a generative force in communicating and shaping new ideas. Interruptions create friction between thoughts, opinions, ideas, and personalities. What we do with that friction is up to us.

So what happens when a dance is interrupted? You can experience the results for yourself in SKETCH 11: Interrupted, which had its live premiere at ODC Theater in August. In case you missed it, the program will be streamed online on October 22nd and will be available on-demand through November 5th.

Now through July 21st, Imagery presents SKETCH: Rewind, on-demand screenings of three SKETCH favorites from the past, featuring Amy Seiwert’s “Instructions,” Jennifer Archibald’s “Shutter,” and Adam Hougland’s “Cigarettes.”

Merce Cunningham is famously attributed with this evocative quip: “Speaking about dance is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall.” As a dancer and writer whose dual creative practices are intimately intertwined, I am perhaps attempting most of all to prove Merce wrong. Words have a powerful capacity to express ideas and feelings, while movement is visceral, multisensory, and yes, sometimes indescribable. For me, the real magic happens when those two worlds meet. In this piece, I’d like to explore the nuances of describing dance in the context of accessibility for people with visual disabilities.

As dancers we’re often trained with a “mind over matter” approach that simultaneously values our mental strength over our physical limitations while also denying the existence of psychological factors or mental illness. “Mind over matter” tells us that when we are sick, angry, sad, or just plain exhausted, that we “use it” to dance better. I’ve experienced this very dynamic and can say that, yes, I’ve done some extraordinary dancing under acute or ongoing mental strain, but the aftermath still leaves a bitter taste, no matter how outstanding the performance.

In ballet, what you look like matters as much as—sometimes more than—what you can do. Ideals and expectations run almost absurdly high, and ballet is known to attract perfectionists who thrive on rigor, dedication, and discipline as much as creativity, expression, and joy. We are made to feel that we are never enough, that we will always fall short in some aspect of ourselves that we cannot change.

Today we welcome Andrew Roth, one of Imagery’s newest board members. This interview is the second in our “Behind the Scenes” series, where we will delve into the people behind our work, from board members to administrators to artists, collaborators, longtime patrons, and cherished community members. Everyone’s voice is important to the work that we do, and we’d like to share and uplift those voices as Imagery moves forward into a bold vision for the future. Conversations are the most important tool we have for generating change.

So, the tricky thing about pointe shoes is that you’re either “on the box” (perched atop the scant square inch or two of the shoe’s flat tip) or “off the box” (doing quite literally anything else). There’s no middle ground, no wiggle room, no “almost.” In fact, the edge of the box is a notoriously dangerous place. Just ask any of the tragically floor-bound pointe shoe-wearers in @biscuitballerina’s #fallingfriday compilations! The box quite often eludes us.

Imagery is committed to transparency in our values and processes, both within our organization and in our engagement with you, our audience, and community. The following interview is an excerpt from our lively conversation with Mike Anestor, one of Imagery’s newest board members. You can listen to the audio recording of this interview below or read the transcript that follows.

In my previous post I outlined the state of affairs and proposed a new outlook on gender identity and expression in ballet. As I reflect on my observations and experiences in this art form, I find that the values put forward on the ballet stage are inextricably bound up in the practices upheld in the training of young dancers. This is where the seeds of change must be planted if we are to shift intentionally toward a new gender paradigm for the future.

In ballet school, girls do one set of things and boys do another set of things.

In ballet companies, “girls” do one set of things and men do another set of things.

It should come as no surprise that these disparities remain--and in fact become even more stark--when it comes to positions of leadership in the ballet world. At Imagery, our fearless female leader has confronted gender bias and inequity head on from the very start in order to craft awareness and shape change for women as leaders in ballet.

Ballet pink, classical pink, European pink. This is the range of tones I grew up with in my dancewear experience. It’s no wonder I knew no color other than pink for the greater part of my dance training; I took pink for granted as the unquestionable uniform of classical ballet. It wasn’t until my late teens that I saw--and a few years later danced for--Dance Theatre of Harlem that I was introduced to the concept of flesh tone ballet attire. This revelation changed me deeply, and though I remained tied to the ballet world I struggled physically and emotionally to engage with pink ever since.