NEW YORK — When Aaron Mattocks became director of programming at the Joyce Theater in 2018, he didn’t have an agenda. He didn’t even have a list of artists he wanted to push. But he knew one thing: “I have no idea what this place needs except change,” he said. “I’m going to shut up and listen, and I’m going to shut up and watch.”
In retrospect, it was a good plan. A couple of weeks into his new job, Mattocks, 39, attended a discussion about decolonizing curatorial approaches. It was there that he saw, for the first time, tap dancer Ayodele Casel. “She stood up and said, ‘I’m going to say this: Tap is a black form,’ ” Mattocks said. “I wrote down her name.”
Casel, who is African American and Puerto Rican, spoke about how tap dancers were being displaced from performance and rehearsal spaces in New York City. “Obviously, I know that tap is open to everybody,” Casel, 44, said recently. “But I wanted to remind people that this is our tradition, and we shouldn’t be pushed out.”
Mattocks took note. Under his watch, Casel — a spectacular tap artist who has been working in the field for more than 20 years — finally has an evening of her own at the Joyce, the dance-dedicated theater that is one of the city’s most important spaces for the art form. In September, she will collaborate with Arturo O’Farrill on a program focusing on Afro-Latin jazz culture. To say that it’s about time is an understatement.
“She’s illuminating, she’s electric, she’s mesmerizing,” Mattocks said. “And that’s before she even starts dancing.”
The fall season is the first to showcase Mattocks’ programming at the Joyce. And he’s not alone: Several other organizations that feature dance have new artistic leaders, including the team of Jonathan Stafford and Wendy Whelan at New York City Ballet; Lili Chopra at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; Courtney Geraghty at the French Institute Alliance Française; David Binder at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; and Eva Yaa Asantewaa at Gibney. It might not be a sea change, but it represents a shift in thinking and generations.
For his part, Mattocks wants to focus on one thing this season: joy. “Entertainment or being happy is not evil,” he said. “It’s being moved positively with dance — and it’s not that it wasn’t here before, but I want to create more experiences of joy for myself. It’s all that I’m craving right now.”
Mattocks may not have been an obvious choice for the job at the Joyce, where the programming has been considered in some quarters unadventurous, but he is an intriguing one: A well-known figure in the downtown contemporary dance and theater world, he has worked as an artist and an administrator, and is sensitive to the needs of both.
Along with artistic vision, he has a breadth of experience: He served as the producer and manager of Pam Tanowitz Dance, the executive director for Big Dance Theater and, for eight years, the general manager of the Mark Morris Dance Group.
While deeply involved in the field, Mattocks said, he “rarely, if ever, felt that the Joyce was for me.” (Part of that had to do with ticket prices; the Joyce has been working on that.) But at his first meeting with Linda Shelton, the Joyce’s executive director, he was struck by her openness. “She really exposed herself and the Joyce and some of the challenges that she had in a way that I was like — oh, she’s aware,” he said.
While the Joyce receives grants, it relies on ticket sales and presents roughly 48 weeks of dance a year. That’s a lot — and it makes the Joyce critical to the field, especially when places like the Kitchen and Performance Space New York (formerly Performance Space 122), have gradually decreased their dance programming. But quality can suffer.
“We talked about, what do you do if there’s a company that does really well, but you can’t personally stand behind the quality of the work?” Mattocks said. One possibility, he told Shelton, would be to commission a new work by an intriguing choreographer to elevate the company’s repertory.
Shelton agreed it was a good idea. “As long as he doesn’t bankrupt us,” she said, “I’m giving him a lot of leeway.”
For his first season, he figured out a way to do something new and basic: Every show will feature live music, including Pam Tanowitz’s exceptional collaboration with the pianist Simone Dinnerstein, “New Work for Goldberg Variations” and Ephrat Asherie Dance’s program, for which Asherie is teaming up with her brother, the jazz pianist Ehud Asherie.
And there’s lots of tap. In addition to Casel, the Joyce will host “And Still You Must Swing,” featuring the collective of Dormeshia, Derrick K. Grant and Jason Samuels Smith; and the choreographer Michelle Dorrance returns with her company and a premiere set to Duke Ellington’s interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite.”
The musicality of tap is a draw for Mattocks, who didn’t start out in dance. Growing up in Pennsylvania, he pursued classical music with a focus on piano, cello and voice. But in high school, he saw a performance of “Chicago” on Broadway and found himself obsessed with Bob Fosse. “I had this moment of not wanting to spend my whole life in isolation in a practice room,” he said. “I sort of broke up with classical music, and it was at a point where I was a senior in high school auditioning for conservatories. My parents were like, ‘What are you going to do?’”
He found the answer at Sarah Lawrence College, where during his freshman year he began studying dance with Viola Farber, the former Merce Cunningham dancer who headed the dance department. It was also at Sarah Lawrence, under the instruction of the historian and writer Rose Anne Thom, that he discovered the work of Mark Morris.
“I was certain that if I could get my way in the door with the Mark Morris Dance Group,” Mattocks said, “that he would fall in love with my humanity and put me in his dances.” When he learned the company was looking for a general manager, he applied for the position.
He saw the company and Morris as a version of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” — if Morris and his company represented all of the March sisters, Mattocks was Laurie, the neighbor who falls in love with Jo but ends up with Amy. “I will marry into this family somehow,” was how Mattocks — laughing yet completely serious — put it.
He was 22, and he got the job. His secret plan was that he would take company class and Morris would hire him as a dancer. “The whole time, I’m like, this is my way in, because I’m terrible at auditions,” he said. “I grow into an interesting person in front of people, but I don’t start out that way. I’m an introvert. I don’t know how to win. I’ve never won anything. So I was like, I will just be a slow burn into Mark’s consciousness.”
He and Morris became good friends, but he never ended up joining the company. He was too good at his job. And Morris, whose love of music is well known, found a kindred spirit in Mattocks. They passed recordings back and forth. Morris took him to his first Wooster Group show and taught him about food.
Mattocks remained with the company until he was just shy of his 30th birthday — he had already started a freelance dance career and wanted to pursue it. He performed steadily for seven years until he gradually began to shift into behind-the-scenes work. He called Tanowitz to see if she needed help — she did — and he also worked with Big Dance and the choreographer Beth Gill. When the Joyce position opened up, it was as if he had been preparing for it for years.
Mattocks knows that ticket sales are critical. But his approach is also connected to his experiences of watching dance performances in public school. “I was able to see a body that looked like the possibility of my body transcended into dance,” he said. “As I came into the Joyce it was deeply in the moment of #MeToo and race and I was like, I want as many people as possible to be able to see themselves in some kind of reflective or transcendent way.”
Not that he will steer clear of work that doesn’t bring joy. “Darkness has a real value, and that is also a real place of learning,” he said. “I think it will be part of the political nature of work that’s coming and the identity politic that we’re going through. It’s not escapist.”
And he is making changes. If, say, he invites a ballet company back to the theater, he has some rules. “You can’t propose a program that doesn’t have a woman or a person of color,” he said. “I don’t think New York is interested in that; I don’t think I’m personally interested in that.”
And there’s another notable twist to his fall programming: “There are no white men in the fall,” he said. “I don’t need that to be a business-model thing, but it was just like let’s just come out the right way. Let’s build up some new stars.”
This article originally appeared in
.