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"The Devil Ties My Tongue" by Amy Seiwert performed for the SKETCH Series, 2013. Photo by David DeSilva. Courtesy of Amy Seiwert's Imagery
Joyce Theater Director’s Wisdom Leads to More Female Work at The Joyce
New York Times: At the Joyce, Embracing Tap and Awe
By Gia Kourlas
3 September 2019
When Aaron Mattocks became director of programming at the Joyce Theater in 2018, he didn’t have an agenda. He didn’t even have a list of artists he wanted to push. But he knew one thing: “I have no idea what this place needs except change,” he said. “I’m going to shut up and listen, and I’m going to shut up and watch.”
In retrospect, it was a good plan. A couple of weeks into his new job, Mr. Mattocks, 39, attended a discussion about decolonizing curatorial approaches. It was there that he saw, for the first time, the tap dancer Ayodele Casel. “She stood up and said, ‘I’m going to say this: Tap is a black form,’” Mr. Mattocks said. “I wrote down her name.”
Ms. Casel, who is African-American and Puerto Rican, spoke about how tap dancers were being displaced from performance and rehearsal spaces in New York City. “Obviously, I know that tap is open to everybody,” Ms. Casel, 44, said recently. “But I wanted to remind people that this is our tradition, and we shouldn’t be pushed out.”
Mr. Mattocks took note. Under his watch, Ms. Casel — a spectacular tap artist who has been working in the field for more than 20 years — finally has an evening of her own at the Joyce, the dance-dedicated theater that is one of the city’s most important spaces for the art form. In September, she will collaborate with Arturo O’Farrill on a program focusing on Afro-Latin jazz culture. To say that it’s about time is an understatement.
Read more in The New York Times.
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