Dance/NYC Announces All-Digital Symposium: Three Days Of Content, 500+ Attendees, And Featured Speakers

The service organization Dance/NYC has announced that videos from its fully digital 2022 Symposium are now available for public dissemination. This year's event, which occurred on Thursday March 17-Saturday March 19, 2022, marked Dance/NYC's second successful all-digital Symposium. Over three days, 500+ people attended the event built around the theme Life Cycles. Livelihoods. Legacies., including dance artists, choreographers, artistic directors, administrators, funders, educators, policymakers, dance writers, scholars, and students.

Sessions explored career and life navigation, underscoring dance and artistic practice as core human needs while building understanding across generations of audiences and dance workers. This multi-day event invited participants to investigate topics of mentorship, advocacy, leadership, and equity, within an ethos of community care. As the only gathering of its kind for the dance community in the metropolitan New York City area, the annual Symposium is a meeting place for the dance field to exchange ideas, expand networks, sharpen organizational practices, and deepen the inquiry around New York City's legacy and trajectory of dance-making.

The event began on Thursday, March 17, 2022 with consultations via a Legal Clinic facilitated by New York State Bar Association's Entertainment, Arts & Sports Law and Intellectual Property Sections and a SmART Bar, organized in collaboration with Pentacle. These sessions partnered Symposium attendees with expert advice in areas including board development, fundraising, marketing and communications.

The inaugural keynote also took place on this day, with welcome remarks and an embodied land acknowledgement offered by River Whittle, followed by a conversation entitled Art-Making and Humanity: Interrogating Attitudes on Culture, Race and Politics Across Decades, moderated by Dr. Sarah Wilbur, Assistant Professor of the Practice in Dance and Director of Graduate Studies at Duke University. Featured speakers included performance artist and NYU Arts Professor Karen Finley; writer, dancer and curator Benedict Nguyen; and dancer/choreographer and Professor at John Jay College and Drexel University Dr. Carl Paris.

The event closed on Saturday, March 19, 2022, with the keynote conversation Building Community Around Dance for a Future Society. Moderated by Onye Ozuzu, Dean of the College of the Arts at the University of Florida and Artistic Director of Ozuzu Dances, it featured a panel discussion with Chris Walker, Dance Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Adham Hafez, Founder and Artistic Director, HaRaKa Platform and Wizara Ecosystems; Kamal Sinclair, Regenerative Leadership Member, Guild of Future Architects; and Kristopher McDowell, Founder of Rhizome Consulting and KMP Artists. Additional sessions for public viewing include panels and discussions on topics such as dance and climate change, art philanthropy, and how to grow a dance business to scale. Participants interrogated how challenges and opportunities evolve over a lifetime in dance, and how to sustain a career rooted in an ethos of equity.

All 2022 Symposium content is available on Dance/NYC's YouTube page. For a full overview of the program, speakers, and more, visit Dance.NYC. Dance/NYC invites attendees of the 2022 Symposium to take the Post-Event Survey. Your feedback will help Dance/NYC and its partners improve its events and overall programming. A full list of the 2022 Symposium Sponsors and Funders can be found at Dance.NYC.

Dance/NYC's mission to promote and encourage the knowledge, appreciation, practice, and performance of dance in the metropolitan New York City area. It embeds core values of justice, equity, and inclusion into all aspects of its programs and operations.