The White Oak Dance Project was a dance company founded in 1990 by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris to be the touring arm of the Baryshnikov Dance Foundation.
The company took the name of the animal preservation and land plantation made famous by dance supporter Howard Gillman, who built dance studios on his White Oak Plantation near Jacksonville, Florida for the company to create its first tour. The studios quickly became the premier location to workshop works being created by many of the world’s leading choreographers.
The company continued to tour until 2002, allowing the Foundation to concentrate on the 2004 opening of the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan. The company featured alumni of major dance companies and commissioned new pieces from Morris, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Jerome Robbins, David Gordon and others.
Famous quotes containing the words white, oak, dance and/or project:
“We black women must forgive black men for not protecting us against slavery, racism, white men, our confusion, their doubts. And black men must forgive black women for our own sometimes dubious choices, divided loyalties, and lack of belief in their possibilities. Only when our sons and our daughters know that forgiveness is real, existent, and that those who love them practice it, can they form bonds as men and women that really can save and change our community.”
—Marita Golden, educator, author. Saving Our Sons, p. 188, Doubleday (1995)
“Where he swings in the wind and rain,
In the sun and in the snow,
Without pleasure, without pain,
On the dead oak tree bough.”
—Edward Thomas (1878–1917)
“They dance between their arclamps and our skull,
Impose their shots, showing the nights away....”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“They had their fortunes to make, everything to gain and nothing to lose. They were schooled in and anxious for debates; forcible in argument; reckless and brilliant. For them it was but a short and natural step from swaying juries in courtroom battles over the ownership of land to swaying constituents in contests for office. For the lawyer, oratory was the escalator that could lift a political candidate to higher ground.”
—Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)