Randy Swartz takes a closing bow on his presenting profession – one which had a large impression on the world of American dance, and one you might need by no means heard of. A decades-long involvement in dance programming, in addition to operating Stagestep, the oldest and largest dance ground firm within the United States, undoubtedly touched the lives and careers of hundreds of dancers nationwide.
To hear Swartz inform his story, it was all a contented accident. His personal dance desires ended early, when he stopped tapping as a baby. He hasn’t been in a dance class since then, some 60+ years in the past. But his data of dance runs deep, his advocacy sturdy, and his firm dedicated to the secure observe and efficiency of dance is a pacesetter in dance flooring.
Swartz received a job as the chief director on the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, within the early Nineteen Seventies. Backed by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, he was tasked with constructing a season from an inventory of 18 corporations.
Swartz remembers, “My very first season of presenting was Paul Taylor (with Mr. Taylor still dancing with the company), Alvin Ailey (Alvin was right there with Judith Jamison as his lead dancer), a new company called Dance Theatre of Harlem (with Arthur Mitchell up front there), José Limón (who passed on later that year but was in the theater), Alwin Nikolais…and then there was Martha Graham. This was all the first season!”
Many seasons on, and Swartz has seen all of it. He calls it the dance bug.
“When you are involved in it and when you participate in it, it sort of stays with you forever,” he says.
Moving ahead, he’ll be seeing all of it from two particular, everlasting seats together with his title on them on the Annenberg Center, a present honoring his years of service to the artwork type in Philadelphia. After 50 years, it was time to let it go.
“Being a dance presenter, starting back in 1971 makes me a gatekeeper,” Swartz says. “I get to pick and choose. After awhile, you get to the point where there has to be other voices and new thoughts. I try to keep up with it all, but if you want to do right by it, you’ve got to hang it up. It’s been a rewarding career. Not many people know or understand what a dance presenter is.”
Even although Swartz says his lengthy profession was half dumb luck, half good timing and half normal curiosity, there’s one thing extra that allowed him to do the work he did so lengthy with such success.
“We had relationships; the audience had relationships,” he says. “That’s the job of a dance presenter. To bring the audience into the theater in some way, shape or form that will allow them to relate to what the companies do.”
If the impermanence of watching dance leaves a everlasting mark that fosters new methods of considering, now we have Swartz to thank for clearing the way in which for therefore many audiences and dancers to have that shared expertise.
By Emily Sarkissian of Dance Informa.
