About The Counterpoint Project

Dancer, curator, and choreographer Endalyn Taylor and visual artist Patrick Earl Hammie are collaborating with five cross-generational ballerinas toward a multi media performance and discussion entitled the Counterpoint Project.

Counterpoint Project explores, discusses, and reframes the ongoing cultural and critical contributions of black ballerinas in dance and visual culture. The title Counterpoint is a play on the ballet term pointe, which is a position on the extreme tips of the toe, and references an element that is juxtaposed and contrasted with another.





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Introduction

The Counterpoint Project is a multimedia live performance, exhibition, and symposium that seeks to reframe the discussion regarding black ballerinas’ contributions to dance and visual culture by confronting racial disparities and institutional discrimination that have endured in  American ballet for more than seventy years.

Endalyn Taylor and Patrick Earl Hammie Discuss Counterpoint Project

The Counterpoint Project seeks to democratize an art form that has traditionally heralded young white bodies and ‘sameness’ as its most treasured aesthetics by addressing several areas of ‘otherness’ within the balletic aesthetic including: brownness, muscularity, physical disability, and accomplishment in the field.

The project creates a platform that educates communities about the historical and present  day accomplishments of groundbreaking black ballerinas in hopes of invigorating the consideration of ballet as a viable professional venture for black and brown youth. Seeing women with similar cultural, social, and economic histories dancing through barriers of biases broadens the perception of what is acceptable and fair in the world of ballet, and challenges the field to investigate the potential for intersectionality in the future.