Dance/USA opens office in NYC. (News).

Dance/USA, the advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., has branched out to bring its organizing skills to New York City. It has set up an office in SoHo and recently launched a Web site teeming with practical information for dancers.

At the head of the new outpost is Bob Yesselman, formerly an administrator with Paul Taylor and The Joffrey Ballet. "The critical mass is here," says Yesselman. "The New York dance community felt its needs were not being well met by an organization whose scope was national. The time is ripe."

Yesselman, while raising money to run an ad campaign to support the Web site, is bursting with ideas. First on the agenda is an awareness campaign about the city's dance legacy that will be launched both on and off the Web. "Much of the history of twentieth-century dance was written in New York," says Yesselman. "Everyone wants to perform here, to study here, to live and to work here. One dancer we interviewed said, `I want to live on the same island as Merce Cunningham.'"

The second is an online calendar that includes New York performance listings on a weekly basis as well as six months in advance, and local listings for dance-related films, lectures, and open rehearsals. In addition, it will post itineraries of New York companies on tour. For all those space-hungry choreographers, the site will have a clearinghouse for information on renting studio and performance space.

Yesselman plans to commission a citywide survey of the economic impact of dance on the city. He feels the study, funded in part by the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, will be a weapon in the struggle to increase city and state funding. "In order for us to advocate, we've got to have the numbers," he says.

In April, Dance/NYC initiated a series of public forums to assess the needs of the dance community. Among the ideas that emerged from these meetings was a monthly "happy hour" to share resources in arts management.

Dick Caples, executive director of the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company and treasurer of Dance/USA, has been agitating for this connection for years. "I'm thrilled that we finally have an organization in dance that is the equivalent of the theater world," he says, referring to Alliance of Resident Theaters/New York, a service organization that does advocacy work for not-for-profit theaters. Caples says that Dance/USA, now in its twentieth year, reduced membership dues last year to make it more accessible. It is his hope that Dance/NYC will "help channel the voice of New York dance upstream to [the national base in] Washington, D.C., and vice versa." See www.dancenyc.org.