17 min
Episode 1: Dance, Dance Revolution: Lincoln Jones of Los Angeles' American Contemporary Ballet The Bleed
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- Entrepreneurship
By any sane ballet world measure, there is no way that Lincoln Jones of Los Angeles' American Contemporary Ballet should now be the artistic director of what the nation's largest classical radio station called "one of America's most exciting and adventurous ballet companies." But he is and he tells The Bleed how he did it.
Jones was already catastrophically late to ballet when he fell in love with it at age 20 and quickly became convinced that to survive, one of our oldest and most traditional classical art forms needed to be dismantled. He moved to NYC, where someone told him it was easy to start a ballet company; it turned out they meant it was easy to incorporate a ballet company. Not surprisingly, he failed. He started again Los Angeles, a town with no real ballet audience, but talked his way into classical music circles, where he believed he'd find one. With just two dancers in a warehouse, he proceeded to address everything he thought was wrong with the art (a not insubstantial list). In the space of a few years, ACB had 21 dancers, a year-round season of 65 performances (before coronavirus shut down live events), and an audience demographic envied for its youth.
During quarantine, Jones has launched two new projects, ACB TV and Outsiders, that bring the company’s iconic content and approach to audiences in L.A. and around the globe. Both provide free, unique and vital ways to engage with the arts for dance audiences, the culturally curious, and dancers themselves. I've included more info on both in the attached document, and you will find local and national press on ACB here.
Produced by Takeshi Lewis.Music: Magic Scout Cottages by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4672-magic-scout-cottagesLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
By any sane ballet world measure, there is no way that Lincoln Jones of Los Angeles' American Contemporary Ballet should now be the artistic director of what the nation's largest classical radio station called "one of America's most exciting and adventurous ballet companies." But he is and he tells The Bleed how he did it.
Jones was already catastrophically late to ballet when he fell in love with it at age 20 and quickly became convinced that to survive, one of our oldest and most traditional classical art forms needed to be dismantled. He moved to NYC, where someone told him it was easy to start a ballet company; it turned out they meant it was easy to incorporate a ballet company. Not surprisingly, he failed. He started again Los Angeles, a town with no real ballet audience, but talked his way into classical music circles, where he believed he'd find one. With just two dancers in a warehouse, he proceeded to address everything he thought was wrong with the art (a not insubstantial list). In the space of a few years, ACB had 21 dancers, a year-round season of 65 performances (before coronavirus shut down live events), and an audience demographic envied for its youth.
During quarantine, Jones has launched two new projects, ACB TV and Outsiders, that bring the company’s iconic content and approach to audiences in L.A. and around the globe. Both provide free, unique and vital ways to engage with the arts for dance audiences, the culturally curious, and dancers themselves. I've included more info on both in the attached document, and you will find local and national press on ACB here.
Produced by Takeshi Lewis.Music: Magic Scout Cottages by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4672-magic-scout-cottagesLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
17 min