My New York Experience (part I)

By Tamara Bracic
CEC ArtsLink Fellow 2007

Part I of III

I come from Slovenia, a country with 2 million inhabitants in Central / East Europe, one of the republics of ex-Yugoslavia that joined the European Union a couple of years ago and started its way towards a prosperous future. In Slovenia, I work as a producer and arts manager in the field of contemporary performing arts, mostly in two organizations – Bunker Productions (www.bunker.si) and E.P.I. Center in Ljubljana.

I was lucky enough to be awarded the CEC ArtsLink Fellowship award (www.cecartslink.org), the best award I have ever received, which offered me an opportunity to experience an interesting, funny and very fruitful professional residency in New York City in fall 2007. A very special organization volunteered to be my host organization during the time of my residency in New York – Dance Theater Workshop. The reputation of this renowned organization was so strong that it reached as far as Slovenia. As I was working on many projects dealing with the artistic creations within the Balkan region, I met Sara Nash on one of the Balkan Dance Platforms in Skopje, Macedonia, some years ago. And that was how I got invited to Dance Theater Workshop, where I spent about a month and a half smuggling around their offices, attending all the meetings with artists, organizational staff meetings, programming meetings…and learned a lot about Dance Theater Workshop. It was interesting to see how it functions. It is bigger than Bunker, where I work, so for example the real-time internal exchange of information is a much bigger task than in our organization, where there is only six of us, all women, all very talkative, so we sooner or later tell each other everything we need to know, together with all the chit chat which can sometimes be, despite its pejorative connotation, quite relevant information.

I was impressed by New York in many ways and for many reasons. It is a great city, where you can see people from all over the world sharing the same sidewalks, bars, underground system and… getting along. You can hear millions of different opinions, see thousands of different faces every day just by walking along the streets and taste an immense number of different national cuisines… It is a place of millions of new ideas, new opportunities and new challenges. And there are so many people living there, trying to achieve their goals and fulfill their dreams that I constantly had a feeling the city bursts with energy. I think people in New York are very energetic and hardworking. After work they take their time to go to fitness centers, cinemas, theatres, concerts and impressively often to basketball and baseball games. As far as I could see the working hours are almost never just eight hours a day… And when we discussed vacation, well, many people do not take more than a week or two off per year. In comparison to Slovenia, that is incredibly little. Together with the vitality of the city and the hardworking ethics goes also the enormous amount of artistic works produced and presented every day… The fact alone that I was able to see three performances on a normal week day says a lot about the artistic production potential of New York City. It is enormous.

During my residency in New York I tried to make the most out of my time. I wanted to see at least one show a day but I sometimes managed to see even three of four of them. I saw a lot of different genres of shows, like contemporary dance, contemporary and classical theatre, musicals and some good jazz, pop, ethno and rock concerts. I even went to two NBA league matches , which I think is a must-see when in New York, even though it was not so strictly connected with my exploration of artistic expressions in the city. But I do think that when one tries to grasp the artistic beat of a city, one has to see a wide range of different things in order to get at least a partial overview of what variety of artistic expressions the city offers. Of course I didn’t leave out the visual arts either, I visited a number of Chelsea galleries, the Metropolitan, MoMa, Guggenheim, PS1 Contemporary Art, Design and MoCa museums and many others… New York offers an incredible variety of artistic and cultural experiences on a daily basis…

During the period of my stay in New York I managed to see also all the scheduled performances at Dance Theater Workshop, among which I was especially impressed by the works of Michel Kouakou and Donna Uchizono. I like the programming concept of Dance Theater Workshop and the formation of different conceptual parts of the program – Studio Series, Fresh Tracks, International performances, Family Matters… It makes a difference between various contexts of presented performances, as well as it allows the audience to see the works of the newest and youngest on the one hand and the very established authors on the other. Through the Artists talks and the Dinner Series the interested audience also gets the chance to meet artists in person and to understand how and why they create their artistic works the way they do.

To be continued….