The DANCE MAGAZINE Awards

ANN REINKING, Ben Stevenson, and David Parsons are the recipients of the Dance Magazine Awards for the year 2000, continuing a tradition of presentations established in 1954. With invited guests in attendance, the awardees will be honored at a party April 10 at the Merkin Concert Hall in Manhattan. Dance Magazine Senior Editor Clive Barnes chairs the awards committee, which is made up of the editors and publishers of Dance Magazine.

Although this year's honorees are from three different dance styles--Ann Reinking from jazz and theater dance, David Parsons from modern dance, and Ben Stevenson from ballet--they share, besides uncommon talent, a gift for creating and perpetuating dances of great popular appeal.

In this new millennium, it is clear that all spheres of arts and entertainment are competing for attention, in theaters as well as on air and online. Dance Magazine's honorees each have captured the imagination of a public hungry not just for entertainment, but for imagination, beauty, innovation, and enlightenment.

ANN REINKING

Time magazine once called Ann Reinking "Terpsiglorious," and maybe that says it all.

She was born in Washington State (one of seven children) but she studied in the summers with the San Francisco Ballet. She apprenticed with Robert Joffrey's Joffrey Ballet and moved to New York City where her first job was with the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall. After making the jump to Broadway, she was nominated for a Tony Award for her leading performance in Dancin', and was nominated for best actress in Goodtime Charley, which co-starred Joel Grey. Reinking is perhaps best known for her starring role in Bob Fosse's autobiographical movie All That Jazz.

Reinking, a sublime Broadway gypsy who indeed became a major presence in the life and work of Bob Fosse, recreated his Chicago in 1997, winning a Tony Award for choreography, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the Astaire Award. Chicago is still running on Broadway, and almost next door, the musical revue Fosse continues to pack them in. This anthology of the choreographer's genius won Reinking--who co-directed with Richard Maltby Jr. and with artistic advice from 1961 Dance Magazine Award winner Gwen Verdon--another Tony credit when it captured Best Musical in 1999. Like Chicago, Fosse captivates with the style, the wit, the daring, the precision of Bob Fosse's creation as well as Ann Reinking's subtlety, dedication, and energy.

Reinking is also artistic director of the Broadway Theater Project in Tampa, Florida, an organization she founded that brings together young people and working theater professionals to build the next generation's artists in the distinctively American art form she epitomizes.

DAVID PARSONS

The world has one less recording engineer and one more choreographer--an exciting, inviting choreographer, at that--thanks to Paul Taylor. Seeing the Paul Taylor Dance Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music made David Parsons--a Midwestern athlete turned New York City dance student turned dropout--decide to forsake his new vocation and give modern dance another shot. Parsons became a Taylor company understudy, supporting himself with a night job pumping gas. When a Taylor dancer fell ill before a tour of the Soviet Union, Parsons was in, and remained in from 1978 to 1987, performing some of Taylor's greatest works and creating roles in Arden Court, Last Look, and Roses.

Parsons began late-night choreographing at the 92nd Street Y's auditorium during this time, teaming up in 1987 with lighting designer Howell Binkley to form the Parsons Dance Company, and began building a repertory that today includes more than forty works. Parson's company mirrors his own physical beauty and derring-do (he once posed nearly nude atop the Chrysler Building); the dancers' exploits often take them airborne, a throwback, perhaps, to Parsons's childhood affinity for trampolining. The Parsons repertory spans human experience and expression, from the jokey angularity of The Letter to the seductive drowsiness of Sleep Study, to the mordant Ring Around the Rosey, his treatment of the plague years which inevitably evokes the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic. This range has made his work in demand with companies around the world, and his own troupe tours more than half the year.

An early work, his and Binkley's stroboscopic tour de force, Caught (1987), remains a classic of popular appeal. Parsons's recent project, directing the dance elements for Times Square 2000, the twenty-four-hour millennium celebration, was aimed at a global audience of billions. As an artistic director, Parsons artfully blends humanity and high tech.

BEN STEVENSON

Think of Ben Stevenson, an Englishman, as the new grand old man of American ballet, since he has now headed a company longer, it is believed, than any other current artistic director.

Stevenson has spent the past quarter-century leading the Houston Ballet, deep in the heart of Texas, and the results have been as outsized as Texas lore would demand. He's shaped a small regional company into an international contender, replete with strong, compelling dancers and an eclectic repertory that includes, most prominently, three full-length, uniquely-Ben-Stevenson ballets: The Snow Maiden, Dracula --part of a vampire-ballet boom as companies nationwide find that, to quote a Dance Magazine headline (October, 1999), "coffins can fill company coffers"-- and the brand-new Cleopatra (Dance Magazine, March, 2000). The company also boasts full-length Stevenson choreographies for Swan Lake, Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, The Nutcracker, The Sleeping Beauty, Peer Gynt, Coppelia, and Don Quixote.

Stevenson, given an Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth last December, won the Royal Academy of Dancing's Adeline Genee Gold Medal for best dancer when he graduated from London's Arts Educational School. He was invited to join Sadler's Wells Ballet by Dame Ninette de Valois. There, he worked with choreographers Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, and John Cranko. He also performed in London's West End productions, taking the juvenile lead in The Music Man, and creating roles in Half a Sixpence and The Boys from Syracuse, as well as dancing on television with the likes of Judy Garland.

In 1967 he staged The Sleeping Beauty, starring Margot Fonteyn, for the London Festival Ballet, crossing the pond the next year and working with the newly-formed Harkness Youth Dancers. He followed with Cinderella, choreographed in 1970 for the National Ballet in Washington, D.C., and a new Beauty to help inaugurate the Kennedy Center.

Since becoming artistic director of the Houston Ballet in 1976, he has commissioned works, engaging the choreographic talents of MacMillan and Christopher Bruce during the 1980s as the first in a core of dancemakers who have enriched the Houston repertory. The British influence, and evidence of what Dance Magazine Senior Editor Clive Barnes calls Anglo-Russian style, is visible in the illustrious roster of Houston ballerinas past and present. They include Janie Parker, Barbara Bears, and Lauren Anderson, the dancer he had in mind when he created Cleopatra, which premiered last month.

Stevenson also coaches renowned dancers from great companies worldwide, among them Angel Corella and Nina Ananiashvili. The latter is to star in a new full-length of Camille, which Stevenson will stage for the Bolshoi Ballet. He often works with the Ballet de Santiago in Chile and the Beijing Dance Academy. Wherever he goes, Stevenson carries with him the English tradition of full-length story ballets, and with it the excitement of growing new dancers--and building new audiences.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Dance Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group