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DANCE NEWS: Dance Magazine Awards Announces Esteemed Honorees for 2022
The 65th Annual Event Will Take Place In Person at Chelsea Factory on December 5, 2022
Dance Media Foundation, in conjunction with Dance Magazine, has announced the honorees for the 65th annual Dance Magazine Awards: Kyle Abraham, Lucinda Childs, Herman Cornejo, Brenda Dixon Gottschild, PhD, and Dianne McIntyre. The Chairman’s Award will go to Jim Herbert of First Republic Bank. The Harkness Promise Award recipients are Johnnie Cruise Mercer and Kayla Farrish.
A tradition dating back to 1954, the Dance Magazine Awards are among the most prestigious honors in the dance field. These awards have long celebrated living legends who’ve made a lasting impact on dance. Past honorees include Misty Copeland, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Tommy Tune, Alvin Ailey, Ohad Naharin, Chita Rivera, Fred Astaire, Bob Fosse and others. The full list can be found here.
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“The Dance Magazine Awards stand for excellence in our field, celebrating the living legends who have made a meaningful, lasting impact on dance. This year's class is a terrific example of the thoughtful, important and diverse body of work they as dancers, choreographers, scholars and artists represent. We are proud to honor them alongside the rising-star Harkness Promise Awardees, as well as our Chairman's Award to First Republic Founder and Executive Chairman Jim Herbert, whose commitment to dance is evidenced in his leadership on multiple boards of performing arts organizations. He has served on the boards of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and Gallim Dance for nearly fourteen years and has been a member of the Board of Trustees of San Francisco Ballet for more than 24 years. He is also the Founder and Chair of Chelsea Factory, the New York dance arts and cultural center that serves as the venue for this year's ceremony,” states Frederic M. Seegal, CEO/chairman of Dance Media.
The ceremony, including performances and celebratory speeches, will take place in person at Chelsea Factory, on Monday, December 5, 2022, at 7 pm EST. A cocktail reception will precede the ceremony at 6 pm. Tickets are now on sale at dancemediafoundation.org. A $275 ticket includes attendance to the in-person ceremony and preshow cocktail reception at Chelsea Factory, and a one-year subscription to Dance Magazine; a $1,000 ticket includes the same, plus exclusive virtual content and an additional donation to the Dance Media Foundation to fund the Harkness Promise Awards. All net proceeds from the ceremony go to the Harkness Promise Awards.
The selection committee for the 2022 Dance Magazine Awards included Dance Magazine editor at large and Dance Magazine Awards chair Wendy Perron, master teacher Sheila Barker, Dance Magazine contributor Joseph Carman, The Dance Edit editor in chief Margaret Fuhrer, Dance Media president Joanna Harp, MoBBallet (Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet) founder Theresa Ruth Howard, incoming American Ballet Theatre artistic director Susan Jaffe, New York City Center vice president for programming Stanford Makishi, Pointe managing editor Lydia Murray, and former American Dance Festival director Charles L. Reinhart. The committee considered nominations from the editorial staff and advisors of Dance Magazine as well as from the dance public.
For more information on the Dance Magazine Awards or to purchase tickets, please visit dancemediafoundation.org.
About the Artists
KYLE ABRAHAM
Choreographer Kyle Abraham—recipient of the 2013 MacArthur fellowship, the 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award and the 2018 Princess Grace Statue Award, among many other recognitions—makes deeply powerful dance works that often speak to the Black American experience. In addition to creating for his own ensemble, A.I.M by Kyle Abraham, he has choreographed for companies around the world, including the Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
LUCINDA CHILDS
Postmodern choreographer and dancer Lucinda Childs started her career as a member of the Judson Dance Theater and founded her own company in 1973. Her rich and varied career encompasses concert works such as Available Light and Dance, her seminal 1979 collaboration with Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt; operas including Mozart’s Zaide, Glass’ Akhnaten and John Adams’ Doctor Atomic; and more than 30 works for ballet companies around the world.
HERMAN CORNEJO
An acclaimed principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre since 2003, Herman Cornejo has danced most of the leading roles of the classical canon and created more than a dozen new ballets with the leading choreographers of today. A frequent national and international guest star, Cornejo has also pursued his own artistic endeavors to foster the creation of new works. His accolades include the Gold Medal in the VIII International Moscow Competition, a New York Dance and Performance ("Bessie") Award for Outstanding Performer in 2013, and the 2014 Prix Benois de la Danse for Best Male Dancer. He has been appointed a Messenger of Peace by the United Nations and was recently recognized as one of America's Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
BRENDA DIXON GOTTSCHILD
Esteemed artist-scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild, PhD, is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, performer, lecturer and professor emerita of dance studies at Temple University. She is the author of four books centering Black dance artists and forms: Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts; Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era; The Black Dancing Body: A Geography From Coon to Cool; and Joan Myers Brown & The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance.
DIANNE McINTYRE
Choreographer Dianne McIntyre is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Doris Duke Artist awardee and a three-time "Bessie" Award winner whose work is rooted in research and explores the intersection of history, culture, personal narrative and the human experience. Her five-decade career encompasses Broadway, television and film, commissions for Dance Theatre of Harlem and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and projects for her own company, Sounds in Motion, such as the adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. She had a longtime collaboration with the late playwright and poet Ntozake Shange, creator of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. McIntyre choreographed the 1998 film Beloved, based on the novel by Toni Morrison.
CHAIRMAN’S AWARD: JIM HERBERT
A Chairman’s Award, chosen by Dance Media CEO Frederic M. Seegal to honor distinctive movers and shakers behind the scenes, will go to Jim Herbert, the founder and executive chairman of First Republic Bank.
HARKNESS PROMISE AWARDS
The Harkness Promise Awards, which offer a $5,000 grant and 40 hours of rehearsal space for innovative young choreographers in the first decade of professional work, will go to Johnnie Cruise Mercer and Kayla Farrish. This award, conferred in partnership with the Harkness Foundation for Dance, is funded by net proceeds from the Dance Magazine Awards ceremony.
