DANCE MAGAZINE AWADS 2001.

New York City--Terese Capucilli, Michael M. Kaiser, Susan Stroman and Damian Woetzel are the recipients of this year's Dance Magazine Awards, which will be presented on Monday, April 23, at the Merkin Concert Hall, at 129 West 67th Street in New York. Presented to more than 150 men, women and organizations since 1954, the Awards recognize ongoing outstanding achievement within the field of dance. Nominations for the Awards come from numerous sources, including the editors, publishers, correspondents and friends of the magazine. The selection process this year was spearheaded by Clive Barnes (Senior Editor and Chairman), Richard Philp (Executive Editor) and Roslyne Paige Stem (President).

Since their inception, the Awards have been held in New York, but their scope is international. Performers may have been selected for an award at relatively early stages in their careers, as were Mikhail Baryshnikov (in 1978) and Robert Joffrey (1963). Or an award may be presented later, when careers have matured and the 0ccomplishments become well known, as with Martha Graham (1956), Katherine Dunham (1968) or Ann Reinking (2000). The Awards have recognized such non-performers as the administrator/manager Jeannot Cerrone (1983) and composer Aaron Copland (1979) and such organizations as CBS Wesleyan University Press (1966) and Dance Masters of America (1984).

TERESE CAPUCILLI

One of the leading interpreters in our time of the works of Martha Graham, Terese Capucilli joined the Martha Graham Dance Company in 1979 and has performed a wide range of the classic Graham roles. These include The Bride in Appalachian Spring, Jocasta in Night Journey, Medea in Cave of the Heart, and She Who Dances in Letter to the World. Graham choreographed for Capucilli the role of the Chosen One in The Rite of Spring (1984), The Crescent Moon in Temptations of the Moon (1986) and the lead in her last completed work, Maple Leaf Rag (1990). Capucilli has been instrumental in the research and reconstruction of many early Graham solos, and in 1998 she set and coached the Colorado Ballet in Graham's masterpiece, Appalachian Spring, the first time in the history of dance that this work has been performed by any company other than Graham's.

Capucilli first studied dance in her native Syracuse, New York. She attended the State University of New York at Purchase, where she received a BFA in dance, and in 1978 was offered a scholarship at the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance in Manhattan. In addition to her career with the Graham company, Capucilli has had roles created for her by Twyla Tharp and Lucinda Childs and has worked in film. She is an associate founder and dancer with Buglisi/Foreman Dance--a modern company formed with colleagues Jacqulyn Buglisi, Donlin Foreman and Christine Dakin (who received a Dance Magazine Award in 1994).

Terese Capucilli's award will be presented to her at the ceremony by actor and graphics designer Bill Randolph.

MICHAEL M. KAISER

Best known, perhaps, as the arts manager who has stepped in and saved arts organizations from pending financial and management disasters, Michael Kaiser began his early training as a baritone, but, he admits, "What I really wanted to do was manage an arts organization." He received his bachelor's degree in economics from Brandeis University and a master's in management from MIT in 1977 and then ran a strategic-planning consultancy for large corporations.

His first major rescue operation in the dance field came in 1985-1987, when he was associate director of the State Ballet of Missouri, a company then struggling with a crippling deficit. From 1987-1989 he was associate director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. In South Africa, he worked to establish a government-supported arts council. He served as executive director of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater Foundation from 1991-1993, during the years when Alley was wrestling with devastating financial problems. He took over as executive director of American Ballet Theatre in July 1995. During his tenure at ABT, he oversaw the elimination of the company's accumulated deficit, increased income from both box office and sponsorship, increased touring activities, inaugurated a junior company and three summer schools and expanded the education and outreach programs.

When he took up the position of executive director of the Royal Opera House in London in November of 1998--the fifth executive director in twenty-two months--most observers doubted that anybody could save the floundering, mismanaged Covent Garden organization, but Kaiser and his team did so, creating a balanced budget, erasing the deficit and establishing a permanent endowment--all in a relatively short period of time.

Kaiser took up his responsibilities as president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington in February. He is quick to point out that he has never been in one job longer than four years--which has the arts world asking, Where next?

Michael Kaiser's award will be presented to him at the ceremony by Claudette Donlon, general manager of ABT

SUSAN STROMAN

Scheduled to open on Broadway this month is Mel Brooks's musical The Producers, for which Susan Stroman is the director and choreographer. (See Dance Theater, page 20.) Stroman is one of the best known choreographers and directors working in theater today. Her list of accomplishments and conquests during the past decade seems to fulfill critic Jack Kroll's early prediction that Stroman "seems poised to join Tommy Tune in filling the vacuum left by the deaths of Michael Bennett, Bob Fosse and Gower Champion [all former Dance Magazine Award winners]. Her work reclaims the primal energy of the embattled American musical."

Stroman grew up near Wilmington, Delaware, where she studied ballet and tap. After touring as a dancer with the original productions of Chicago and Sugar Babies, her big break came with a Greenwich Village revival of Flora, The Red Menace. After that, Liza Minnelli invited her to choreograph her show Stepping Out at Radio City Music Hall, and in 1995, Harold Prince engaged her as choreographer for his Broadway revival of Show Boat, for which she won a Tony. Other shows include Big--The Musical, Steel Pier, Picnic and the annual Madison Square Garden spectacular A Christmas Carol. She has choreographed three productions for the New York City Opera, one ballet, Blossom Got Kissed, for the New York City Ballet's fiftieth anniversary season, and a ballet, But Not For Me, for the Martha Graham Company. She conceived, directed and choreographed Contact at Lincoln Center, for which she received, among other awards, a 2000 Tony Award. She also won a Tony for her choreography of 1992's Crazy for You, and she was honored with the coveted Olivier Award for London's Royal National Theatre production of Oklahoma!

Susan Stroman's award will be presented to her at the ceremony by three members of her Contact cast: Stephanie Michels (Girl on the Swing), Deborah Yates (Girl in the Yellow Dress), and Karen Ziemba (Housewife).

DAMIAN WOETZEL

The latest in a long line of American-trained classicists at New York City Ballet, Damian Woetzel is a brilliant technician as well as a fascinating stage personality. His most recent conquest this winter was in the central role--a Renaissance man--created for him by Eliot Feld for the premiere of Organon. Woetzel has left his mark on ballets as varied as Robbins's Fancy Free, Balanchine's Stars and Stripes and Agon, and the Pan-like figure in Twyla Tharp's The Beethoven Seventh.

Woetzel's early training was at The Boston Ballet School; at age 15, he and his family moved to Los Angeles, where he joined the Los Angeles Ballet in 1983 during his last year in high school. After studying at the New York City Ballet's School of American Ballet in 1984, he joined NYCB's corps and, in 1989, was promoted to soloist, then in the same year to principal. He has performed more than fifty principal roles with NYCB, is a choreographer (Ebony Concerto and Glazounov Pas de Deux for NYCB, among other productions), has appeared in film and on TV, is a member of the guest faculty at SAB, and has been the director of the ballet program at the New York State Summer School for the Arts since 1994. An enormously popular dancer with the public, Woetzel is widely regarded as one of the troupe's leading dancers.

Damian Woetzel's award will be presented to him at the ceremony by Eliot Feld.