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Presentation of Fly: Five First Ladies of Dance

Recipient

Grant Year 2010

Grant Amount $80,500

Status Completed

Updated May 30, 2023

The Painted Bride Art Center presented Fly: Five First Ladies of Dance, featuring Germaine Acogny, Carmen de Lavallade, Dianne McIntyre, Bebe Miller, and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Collectively, these five artists span a huge range of African American dance experience. To amplify the public impact of this project, Painted Bride also initiated a program of interviews with Philadelphia dance artists who work in traditions represented by the guest artists, which are available on a website dedicated to the project. Public events in addition to the sold out performances included line dancing classes; a preshow discussion with dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild about her work on a new Center-funded biography, Joan Myers Brown & The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance; and a "behind-the-scenes" intimate conversation with the Fly participants, facilitated by Dixon Gottschild.

Recipient

Painted Bride Art Center

As a presenting arts organization, the Painted Bride offers a wide range of work—from the cutting edge to that which is simply new to Philadelphia—in music, dance, spoken word, and theater. Located in Old City in a building that glitters with one of Isaiah Zagar's mirrored mosaics, the Bride's Center-supported work includes Bill T. Jones' Body Against Body, which revisited and showcased the groundbreaking choreography of Jones and his late collaborator and partner, Arnie Zane; Skins & Songs, which featured new collaborative compositions from the Spoken Hand Percussion Orchestra and Philip Hamilton's Voices, an a cappella and vocal percussion group; a commission of a new play, If She Stood, from three-time Obie Award-winning writer, director, and actor Ain Gordon; and the 20-month Re-Place-ing Philadelphia project, which used art as a lens for viewing the city and its history.

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