SPRING 2008 NEWS

Support ADLI Thanks to an anonymous donor, all donations made in the next year will be matched dollar for dollar. So if you've ever considered supporting ADLI, now is the time to give as your donation will immediately double in value! Give Now	Upcoming Events Workshop and Performance on August 16, 2008 in Saratoga Springs
	Recent Happenings Our annual Winter Dance Concert was March 1st in Providence.
	Founders Corner reflections and ideas from Carolyn and Julie "Art: The Cultural Secret" from American Education and the Arts, 1993
	MiniConversation Q&A with Dancing Legacy member Marisa Ballaro

MiniConversation
with Marisa Ballaro

Marisa Ballaro is a dancer who performs and choreographs on an independent basis. A member of Dancing Legacy, Marisa lives in Manhattan and works as a teaching artist for LEAP (Learning through an Expanded Arts Program).

Hometown: Buffalo, NY

When did you start dancing? At 2 1/2, I held an older dancer's hand and walked on the stage during the finale of the annual performance at my mom's dance studio. I wore an old tutu from our basement. I started classes that fall and have never stopped.

When did you know that dance would play an active role in your life? I always knew. My mom was a dancer and at a young age, I found the life lessons (discipline, commitment, creativity, expression) that exist deep inside of the art form. At 13, after my first summer at the New York State Summer School of the Arts, where I first encountered ADLI, I returned home, begged my mom to find a modern dance teacher, and I knew that it was something I needed to do forever in some way in my life

Favorite non-dance activity? I recently started running to increase my cardiovascular strength. I run a few times a week, and I love to explore different areas of New York. My goal is to run the NYC Marathon!

One thing about dancers most people don't know? We are smart. Many people still think that all dancers can do is kick their legs up in the air and that we chose dance because we weren't good at anything else. We actually have other interests--I love to research, and I am incredibly interested in the science of dance--anatomy, physiology and kinesiology. Most people couldn't believe I was a dance major AND in the honors program in college.

One thing about the dance field, you'd change I wish dancers were viewed as contributors to the "working world"--not people with strong hobbies.

What has your involvement with ADLI meant to you? ADLI has helped me be able to speak more articulately about dance, its role in history, and why we need to save it.

Last Project: I presented my choreography at a festival in New Haven, Connecticut, a few weeks ago. It was great to bring my work on the road for the very first time.

Coming up: I have been chosen to receive a scholarship to attend Dance/USA's National Performing Arts Convention: "Taking Action Together" this June in Denver. In August, I will set my choreography on students attending the New York State Summer School of the Arts.

Upcoming Events

Workshop and Performance
August 16, 2008 - Saratoga Springs, New York
Longtime partner, New York State Summer School of the Arts School of Dance, is celebrating its 20th season this summer with an alumni reunion. ADLI is pleased to join the festivities and will run a participatory workshop during the day. ADLI's performing and teaching ensemble, Dancing Legacy, will perform in the Faculty and Guest Artists Concert that evening.

Recent Happenings

Our annual Winter Dance Concert, in typical ADLI fashion, was an intergenerational potpourri. The concert included classic dances, contemporary works, abstract dances, theatre pieces, and dances of social commentary; performers and choreographers ranging in age from 15 to 65, including dancers at the height of their careers, teenagers contemplating a future in dance, and college dancers immersed in the humanities and sciences committed to future careers in fields other than dance; and mothers and daughters sharing the stage.

The concert was March 1st in Providence Rhode Island's Ashamu Dance Theatre. ADLI's performing and teaching ensemble Dancing Legacy, opened the show with Robert Battle's Battle Etude and also performed Danny Grossman's Triptych. Dance Extension, Brown University's repertory company, danced in Come on! by company member Rachel Forman, Donna Jewell's Madame Sand, and Robert Battle's Rush Hour, which closed the show. New to the ADLI family was Bald Soul, the ongoing collaboration of Olase Freeman and Kathryn McNamara, who performed their work Choice & Forgiveness. Victoria Fortuna and Sita Frederick (both members of Dancing Legacy) presented their choreography, Remembering Acts and Maletumba I respectively. Unfortunately, weather kept away the Catalyst Dance Company of the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter High School, but Arabella Project, after a three-year absence from the concert roster, returned to premiere StreamScape.

Founders Corner
reflections and ideas from Carolyn and Julie

ART: THE CULTURAL SECRET
by Carolyn Adams
American Education and the Arts, 1993

Some of the isolation and mystery that has surrounded and shrouded the arts in our culture has been brought about by the field itself. There has been a fear that familiarity would eliminate some of the magic. Artists, like members of secret societies, must protect their treasures through exclusionist practices and initiation rites. When everyone in the culture knows the secret of a process, an object, and its "useful" purpose, we call it folkart, craft, or entertainment. When only a few know or have access to the secret we call it Art.

The reality is that secrecy is a relative term. If there were truly a secret, we wouldn't know that anything was being hidden from us. So - first we must be informed that something is being withheld, and then, depending on how important it is to us to be included, we respond in a variety of ways. We can ignore the mystery altogether. We can throw ourselves at the feet of the high priests and priestesses at the initiation rite, begging for acceptance, taking on any and all guises to insure entry to the inner sanctum. We might create a secret society of our own, emulating those who have shunned us, thus perpetuating the exclusionist practice. But we might also find, in tranquil lucidity, the possibility of existing in the presence of great mysteries without the need to solve them, but with a ferocious appetite for exploring and describing them. These self-affirming acts of discovery place us in the path of the process of art in which discernible, tangible, logical, and documentable evidence plunge us even deeper into the mysteries of life.

It is useful to acknowledge that we must find ways of describing what we do in language that is understandable to other fields. The different disciplines use language differently because they perceive things differently, not because they are perceiving different things. Language is always imprecise, and analogies are only useful as approximations of equality, but when people who speak different languages wish to communicate, analogies facilitate the process.

In dancing, for example, technique is skill and language; movement and gesture are content; composition is synthesis and invention; composition class is a laboratory for experimentation and invention; the study of repertory is research and analysis; rehearsal is study and memorization; and performance is thesis, examination, and presentation. Although these descriptions are oversimplifications, they, in fact, clarify more than they obscure. For the person unfamiliar with dance who peers into a studio where students are working on independent projects in choreography, it is helpful to know that what is being observed can be likened to a chemistry laboratory. In both situations, the nature of the work being done is not readily discernible to the eye, and there is no evidence of a center of organization. Dispelling the myth that focus, skill, and rigor are only present when structure and order are visible is of great importance both to the artist and the educator.

In teaching and in the creation of art, much of what is actually taking place is invisible to the eye. In our zeal to produce tangible evidence that something has in fact transpired, we are in great danger of omitting, from our descriptions, the actual process of learning and creating. Therefore, it would seem that perpetuation of the mystique of each of the disciplines is of less use in teaching, learning, and bridging gaps, than simple access to the work and to the language of each discipline.

If, as artists, we were to devote our entire lives to revealing secrets and dispelling mysteries, it would become apparent that all we had revealed was our individual responses to personal moments of revelation which may have taken the form of a codified dance technique, a work of art, a performance, a method of reaching people. The real secrets are still safe because no one of us ever possessed them. Our lives as artists are about alluding to the mysteries of life, not to solving them, and to partaking in the magic of life, not to owning it. It may very well be that this is why much of what we do is not considered useful or productive. Yet it may not be necessary for the artist to prove usefulness in order to survive, it may be enough for the artist to simply describe and define the process and craft in as many forms of language as possible so that anyone and everyone can know of, and have access to the secret. Then the artist can simply declare: "This is what I do. I am an artist."