Dance Baltimore celebrates 20 years of providing teaching, performance, and networking opportunities to the local professional dance community — and of sharing dance with the public.
Dance Baltimore founder and director Cheryl Goodman said that years ago she had tried talking to another local news outlet about covering dance in Baltimore and ran into resistance.
“When I tried to talk to them about covering dancing, they said, ‘Well, there is no dance in Baltimore. There’s no ballet company here,’” Goodman said.
Her response: “There’s dance other than ballet, there’s a lot of dance, you’re just not covering it.”
Goodman said the Mechanic Theater learned of the dance community’s efforts to increase visibility and offered their space for them to perform. “We took the lead and decided that we would pull together as many dance ensembles as we could find professional groups, and we do … a free performance there. The mandate was that it had to be free,” Goodman said. They “sold” out of tickets to reserve spots in a matter of weeks and filled the Mechanic’s more than 1000-seat (at the time) theater.
As part of Dance Baltimore’s 20th-anniversary celebration, it is bringing back some of those dance groups that still exist today, and it will be joined by newcomers to the local dance scene to perform works by international choreographers like Stephanie Powell, Maria Broom, and Vincent Thomas. A total of 14 professional area companies will perform a variety of dance styles, including Modern, House, Flamenco, Ballet, and African.
Just like the first and subsequent concerts, tickets are free, but reservations are required. It will be held at the Gordon Center for the Performing Arts, located on the campus of the Rosenbloom Owings Mills JCC. The concert will be Sunday, Nov. 5, at 4 p.m.
Other 20th anniversary celebratory activities include an Interactive Movie Night and a VIP Reception.
The Interactive Movie Night takes place on Sunday, Nov. 19 at 4 p.m. at Creative Alliance. Goodman told Baltimore Fishbowl that Creative Alliance has been doing these interactive movie nights for a while, so she asked if they would schedule a dance movie during Dance Baltimore’s anniversary month, and they decided to run “Dirty Dancing.”
“We’re looking for people to come dressed as the characters to reenact some of the scenes like when they do the dancing. Instead of you sitting in your seat and watching, everybody can get up on the floor and dance when they are in the movie,” Goodman said. “The only thing we’re trying to work on now is the ending scene where Baby jumps into Patrick Swayze’s arms, like overtop his head. We’re trying to figure out how we can do this safely,” she laughed.
Tickets for the Dirty Dancing Interactive Movie Night are $25 each, and are available to buy at this link.
The VIP Reception is planned for Friday, Nov. 3 at 5:30 p.m., and will take place at the James E. Lewis Museum of Art, located at the Murphy Fine Arts Center at Morgan State University. Tickets to the reception are $35, and can be purchased on the Dance Baltimore website.
Dance Baltimore is an organization serving the dance community. They provide professional development, seminars, workshops, and community outreach. After that first concert 20 years ago at the Mechanic, Goodman said the dance groups came together to talk about the experience.
“They identified four areas that they wanted. They wanted to see more audience development. They wanted more performance opportunities. They wanted more media attention, and they wanted more networking amongst themselves around the arts community in the dance community,” Goodman said. “And so those are the four objectives that have gotten advanced in Baltimore over the years. Some of the things we really tried to address.”
Part of their audience development involves the free classes they teach, like the flash mob classes they taught for Artscape. At the end of October, Dance Baltimore is teaching a free class on Tuesday, Oct. 24 at 6:30 p.m., in which attendees can learn the dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” just in time for Halloween! This is part of the Free Fall Baltimore program, and participants can register for this and any of the other free Tuesday classes by clicking this link.
