The jeweler’s generously funded Dance Reflections program is having a major influence on the city’s scene. How much impact is too much?
Last fall, the New York City dance scene was taken over by a jeweler: Van Cleef & Arpels.
The company’s Dance Reflections, a festival of contemporary dance, lasted from October to December and sprawled across the city’s theaters. Lavishly advertised and well attended, it made a big enough splash that the ripples can still be felt.
“Dance Reflections is the best thing to happen to the New York dance scene in the last 25 years,” said Jay Wegman, the executive director of NYU Skirball, a principal site for the festival.
The big splash might have been anticipated from reports of previous iterations in London, Los Angeles and Hong Kong. More surprising, perhaps, were the ripples — Dance Reflections’ continuing sponsorship of performances through the spring of 2024 at Skirball, New York City Center and the Joyce Theater. This fall, it will also fund L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival, a large-scale premiere by Kyle Abraham at the Park Avenue Armory and a 30th-anniversary revival of Bill T. Jones’s contentious “Still/Here” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Dance Reflections, which Van Cleef started in 2020, is on one level a roving festival; in October, it arrives in Japan, and will return to London next year. But these events are only the most visible aspect of what has quickly become a global force in contemporary dance. Dance Reflections supports residencies, workshops, revivals, new productions and touring through a snowballing network of partnerships with theaters, festivals and dance companies in 16 countries — so far. At a time when funding for dance has been shrinking, even in Europe, this project keeps expanding.
Even more unusually, this deep-pocketed corporate patronage program is directed not by a marketing team, but by a curator dedicated to dance. Serge Laurent, the director of Van Cleef’s dance and culture program, comes from the world of contemporary art. He was a curator for the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art and the Pompidou Center in Paris, where he was in charge of live performances for 20 years.
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