Jane Raleigh on Curatorial Vision and Bridging Tradition with Innovation

Monica Holt: Welcome back to CI to Eye. I’m Monica Holt. Today I’m talking with Jane Raleigh, who spent the past several years transforming how the Kennedy Center thought about dance. She worked to break down artificial barriers between ballet and contemporary forms, championed local artists, and slowly, methodically brought audiences along on a journey from the classical to the cutting edge. When everything shifted this past February, Jane took the difficult choice to stay at the institution in an effort to protect the platform and the artists who depended on it. But in August, that choice was taken from her and she and her entire team were let go anyway. Now Jane’s the picture of resilience and she’s doubling down on her firm commitment to community. She launched DC Dance Network, a grassroots support model that asks, what if we stopped waiting for institutions to save us and started building community infrastructure ourselves? Jane and I go way back, but there was nothing quite like working together through those uncertain February weeks trying to figure out how to lead when everything around us was falling apart. Today we talk a bit about that experience and what it teaches us about resilience, values-driven leadership, and when it’s time to build something new. Let’s dive in.

Jane Raleigh, welcome to CI to Eye. Thank you so much for being here.

Jane Raleigh: Thank you for having me. So good to be together.

Monica Holt: It’s good to be together always, and especially now. We’ve worked together at the Kennedy Center for many years, but what a lot of folks don’t know is that I’ve known Jane since her college days. We both went to William and Mary and even though I graduated before you got there, we were tied together through the eternal bonds of our college a cappella group, The Christopher Wren Singers.

Jane Raleigh: Yeah. What I think is funny is I know that singing is integral to my entire life, but most people who know me in the dance world know me after I stopped singing. So the big reveal, singing was a huge part of my life until I graduated college.

Monica Holt: Jane can sing. She’s pretty great at it actually. So in school, you chose to study Hispanic studies and dance. Did you have a sense coming out of college that arts administration was for you and that was where you were headed because of those studies?

Jane Raleigh: No, not at all. I don’t think I knew what arts administration was and actually when I graduated I was fully intending to become a UN interpreter for Spanish. That was the path I had myself on.

Monica Holt: Listen, you would’ve been great.

Jane Raleigh: And sometimes I think there’s still an alternate universe where I just have to pick up one of the other five major languages of the UN. So, easy task.

Monica Holt: Totally.

Jane Raleigh: I didn’t understand that arts administration was a career path. I thought you could be an artist, and I had done a series of internships in college and volunteering doing backstage work, hanging lights, doing minimal lighting design, things like that and really enjoyed that. But I didn’t know there were computer people in the arts.

Monica Holt: Oh, completely. I feel like this is a theme with so many folks we talked to, that it’s just, how did arts administration become so opaque?

Jane Raleigh: Yeah.

Monica Holt: But then this gorgeous thing happened, which is you joined the Kennedy Center and you actually did not join immediately in programming.

Jane Raleigh: No. What’s funny is I was an intern, technically in programming. So it was the Performing Arts For Everyone team, and I did millennium stage work and made over a hundred programs for artists on millennium stage in that one semester internship and then basically decided the only thing I wanted was to stay in the building and get any job that was available in the building and ended up in group sales in the marketing team where you were.

Monica Holt: Group sales at the center, I will say, is crucial, particularly given the amount of four to six to eight week engagements we have. You can imagine the business model for that. You are reliant upon groups and schools and tourists who want to come through and organize that way. What perspective on the arts did you get being in that department?

Jane Raleigh: Yeah. At the time, the group sales department was divided by market, so I was the associate for the tour and travel market, so I was mostly dealing with buses of middle schoolers coming from middle America to their DC trips, and the tour companies would call and book. ‘Let’s bring them to a show at the Kennedy Center.’ And I do think that my time in group sales opened my mind to the power of data. I remember taking it upon myself to look at the sales I had done and just practice modeling them, like putting them into pie charts, putting them into bar charts, which I’m sure now it was probably laughably rudimentary what I was doing, but it was the first time that I was trying to model what my emails were into a visual thing and then trying to take a decision from that or suggest something from that.

Monica Holt: A data self starter. We love that. And frankly, a good little nugget for a lot of us who when we don’t know where to start, just use the numbers you have and see how you can start understanding better what’s happening. That’s fabulous. You’ve talked a little bit about how in school you were dancing, you grew up dancing, so when an opportunity opened on the dance team at the center, how did you pitch yourself? How did you find your way back over to the programming department?

Jane Raleigh: Yeah, I think there was a lot of luck in that because as anyone in the arts knows, those programming jobs in your specialized field are so few and far between, and I know that so many talented people were applying for that job. I used to always tell interns when they would ask, how did you get that job? Interviewing for dance programming was the first interview. I never lied in at all, where people are just like, what’s your favorite part about making copies? And you’re like, Ugh. The smell of the Xerox machine keeps me going. And it was really the first moment in my career where I was like, wow. Every answer I gave was just pulling from my own nerdy love of what dancers I thought were amazing and who I was looking at on Instagram. And I did realize for the first time, the thing I just cared about was useful all of a sudden.

Monica Holt: That’s a great way to describe it. For me, I loved marketing, but when I was talking about moving to the theater department, it’s the same thing. It’s these very nerdy, detailed things you remember back through childhood, which are actually going to serve you when you’re casting a show or choosing a company or looking at what the season looks like.

Jane Raleigh: Yeah.

Monica Holt: You then stayed in dance programming. You worked your way up, but I would also say you worked your way out. It wasn’t about what is the next job or what is the next promotion, but you were also really seeding relationships across the building and throughout the community. You found yourself as the director of dance programming at the Kennedy Center, and when you had arrived, dance at the center was more traditionally siloed. There was a ballet track, a contemporary dance track, and I think it was clear from kind of the moment you stepped into the director of dance seat that you understood and honored the tradition and the foundation that was built, but that you really wanted to transform the way both the institution and audiences were thinking about dance. I think you expressed it to me as a continuum is how we talked about it a lot. So talk a little bit about your vision for that evolution and your programming philosophy.

Jane Raleigh: Yeah. The Kennedy Center had always traditionally separated its ballet season from its dance season, and the dance season had been called the modern dance season. Then it became the contemporary dance season. Then we just called a dance because of course dance was also, tap was also classical Indian dance was also hip hop was also everything else. I think it’s also important to name those two series were curated by two different people. There was a ballet curator then that was the role I stepped into, but Alicia Adams had been curating the dance season for multiple decades and doing so incredibly with this amazing international view and all of that. What I have come to articulate about it is that an audience only knows what you teach them. And in the 50 years of the Kennedy Center, I believe we spent the entire time teaching our audience that ballet is separate from all other dance forms and that traditional classical ballet is the only ballet that exists, which just isn’t true.

And no other venues in the world separate ballet from dance, no other venues in the United States have two separate series. The beauty of that and the incredible platform of it is that the Kennedy Center presents more dance than basically any other venue in the United States. So for that, we are tremendously lucky, but this separation always felt artificial to me, and right when I stepped into the director role, I was also hearing that from external voices, leaders in the field who were challenging, why were these two things separated? So I think about it now as a spectrum of bringing the two sides together. It’s not only bridging the gap between ballet and dance, but also there’s so many other sub aesthetics or flavors of each of these dance forms that the Kennedy Center just never presented on the full end of the contemporary dance spectrum. There’s postmodern performance art that our audience just never quite had a tolerance for yet. And even in the classical ballet side of things, this more contemporary ballet aesthetic where the point shoe isn’t as necessary where it’s more abstracted. We didn’t see a lot of that at the Kennedy Center, and so I saw that there were a lot of gaps that could be filled if we just worked to bring our audience along. But again, you’re fighting against that. We have told our audiences for 50 years that these things are binary and they are separate from each other.

Monica Holt: So how did you think about bringing audiences along? Folks who are the traditionalists who want Swan Lake, but also the adventurous audience members who maybe wouldn’t have opted into what they saw as classical ballet, and how do you start to commingle those ideas?

Jane Raleigh: Yeah, most importantly, I think I had to come to terms with the thought that the transformation had to be very slow and that you can’t just make all the changes you want to make and expect that the audience is going to come along with you. So I would frequently ask myself, what are the incremental steps that if in five years I would like the audience to be excited about something, what are the intermediary steps to get them there? One sort of tangible way I used to to think about it is we have in the ballet cannon, these really well-known titles that basically will always sell: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Don Quixote. And so I used to think about how could we do a Swan Lake that introduces a company the audiences have never seen, where the company name doesn’t have recognition,

and then how does that guarantee us a certain load-in of people who are just going to buy the ticket because it’s Swan Lake, no matter what. A great example in this past season, American Ballet Theater has been coming to the Kennedy Center since 1971 for the center’s entire existence, usually doing these big classics. Our audiences know the dancers by name. They know the company so well, and Crime and Punishment, which they brought this year, was wildly contemporary for what they normally do at the Kennedy Center. A contemporary choreographer, Helen Pickett. News story. Some people are going to buy a ticket to ABT no matter what, and then you’ve encouraged them into taking a risk that maybe they didn’t realize they were taking.

Monica Holt: Encourage them to trust the company and the curation.

Jane Raleigh: Yeah, I have such a strong memory. I was at a ballet show standing in the lobby of the opera house during an intermission, and I had a longtime subscriber come up to me and they were like, I hate your season next year. And I said, okay. I was practicing receiving feedback from anyone who wanted to give it, so I was just like, great, tell me more. Thank you for your honesty. Tell me more. Why do you hate the season? And they said, it’s all new. There’s nothing traditional that I can hold onto, and I just feel totally out of my depth. I hate it. I said, thank you so much for that feedback. Literally not 10 minutes later, another subscriber came up and was like, I hate your season. And I was like, oh, okay, tell me why. And they were like, it’s so traditional. It’s the same stuff you always do. It’s so boring. There’s nothing new. And I was like, thank you so much for that feedback. And then I just left that conversation like, I’m doing it.

Monica Holt: You did it. Well, I mean you did it. You were always so good about being very in touch with the folks who were coming to the shows and you were always there and talking to audiences. And I think that’s such an important piece of it too. And I remember early days when you were in the role, you were navigating, how much do I respond to If you get a letter that’s passed along to you from a subscriber, but I think ultimately you took the position of I’ll respond to anything that’s feedback or that’s constructive or where it’s clear someone wants to engage. Definitely that’s a beautiful thing that not everyone does. So I really commend you for your approach with that.

Jane Raleigh: Thank you. I really think that that dancer mentality on my team, we would talk a lot about that, that it’s always a joy to hire dancers because dancers are trained to take corrections. And so giving small amounts of feedback about people’s administrative work, dancers are just like, why thank you for that feedback. And then they just make the correction in a way that non-dancers don’t always receive feedback.

Monica Holt: That’s fantastic to think about it that way. So as you were making this change, obviously that comes with internal change management too, that comes with its own set of challenges both day to day and also personal wear and tear. How did you manage as you were embarking on what the future of the dance program was going to be? What was the Jane take to manage the internal changes?

Jane Raleigh: Yeah, I think the Kennedy Center, like any historic institution, is full of traditions and history and people who just believe that we need to keep doing things that way because we, it took me a long time to start to understand how different people wanted to receive information, and I think that was the thing that opened the door for me to be more successful at bringing people along or starting to align people to the vision for the changes I was trying to make. You start to learn that different people want to see the data or different people want to understand the story behind your reasoning for making that choice, or certain people just want to understand it as a comparator to another thing that they understand better than the dance thing you’re talking about. And once I was able to realize what they were looking for, then I could change my presentation to be more successful to bring people along.

Monica Holt: And as you say, you were working across so many different programmatic areas, even just in ballet, ballet and dance, but you were also quite a champion for local commissioning projects. How did you think about the importance of the local dance community in your time at the center? And also how did you make that commitment work both artistically and financially?

Jane Raleigh: I have always felt a commitment to the local community because I’m part of it. I think the uniqueness of growing up in this region is that at the same time that I was working in group sales fresh out of college, I was also performing in a local dance company. Eventually I stopped being on stage as much, but from the very beginning I always could see that there was a lot of room for opportunity for the Kennedy Center to engage with the community. I have to shout out Garth Ross, the leader of PAFE when I was an intern there, who taught me about the creative ecosystem, which then I later learned is a Marc Bamuthi Joseph-ism, who then came and led social impact. So that way of thinking and way of engaging with the community has been foundational to my understanding of arts administration going into community group, gathering people that you trust and being the curator of the questions that you ask them to help guide where you go and in what direction you go. I’ve just seen firsthand how powerful that feels to be inside. And because I learned that approach so early in my career, that has informed the way that I have worked with the dance community locally ever since then.

Monica Holt: That makes complete sense. And also you allude to the fact that you’re still a practicing dancer yourself, and so keeping that connection being so fundamental, you also, when you were engaging with particularly the local commissioning projects, you didn’t feel tied to just using the theaters in a traditional format. I mean, the number of site specific works you did really across the season, but also with new commissions was a beautiful thing for other folks who have campuses, have theaters, but maybe want to explore how they bring art outside of those spaces. Can you talk a little bit about how you had those conversations and where those projects came from and where you found success?

Jane Raleigh: Yeah. I talk a lot with a local colleague here named SarahBeth Oppenheim, who is — in 2016 she won the local dance commissioning project. She really taught me how to do site-specific well as the artist because she just was not afraid to ask for everything she actually wanted. And then the Kennedy Center said no to 99% of the things that she originally asked for. But then I sort of saw it as a challenge of how many of these nos can I turn to yeses as the administrator? And then that became a theme for me throughout in the Kennedy Center. And so that was a really great experience for me to have an artist who was truly honest about what they wanted, and it helped me develop a rapport internally as an administrator to say, I’m here representing the artist. If we can’t do this, can we do 80% of it? If we can’t do it in blue, can we do it in red? And trying to find out what the compromises were, but in retrospect, I think that also helped me develop the way that I have a relationship with most artists, which is I will always try to get to the yes for you. So when I give you a no, it’s real.

Monica Holt: That’s the whole ball game that, and artists don’t need to edit what the ask is, let the institution let the administrators work with you to figure out how much of that dream can be a reality. I think both of those are such important pieces of advice. What are a couple of programs from your time at the center that you are most proud of?

Jane Raleigh: I think the program that I’m the most proud of is Reframing the Narrative, which was a festival that we did in the spring of 2022, and then it led to offshoots called Pathways to Performance that happened in 2024 and were supposed to happen in 2026. It was a one week ballet festival in the Opera House, started as an idea of needing to shed light or shine a bigger spotlight on black contributions in the classical ballet realm. And back to what we were saying about creative ecosystem, I started by bringing in two guest curators, Theresa Ruth Howard, who’s the leader of the Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet, and Denise Saunders Thompson, who at the time was the leader of the International Association of Blacks in Dance. And just let them lead what they felt as experts in their sector of the field, what they felt it should be.

Denise led the curation of a shared program of the three historically black ballet companies in America that all come out of the Arthur Mitchell lineage. So that was Dance Theater of Harlem from New York, Collage Dance Collective from Memphis, and Ballethnic from Atlanta. And then Theresa wanted to do an experiment where we created a pickup company of black identifying dancers who performed in predominantly white ballet companies where they were the only one or one of a few black dancers in their home companies, bringing them all together in an all black company. We commissioned Donald Byrd, a black choreographer to create a work, and then we hired a black composer, a black conductor, a black lighting designer, a black stage manager, and brought all of these people together to create a world’s premiere. And it was sort of a ballet experiment, but also a social experiment to see how the dancers could be affected by being in an all black space. For most of them, it was for the first time in their lives, and it turned out to be this uplifting, incredible piece of art. The world premiere was amazing, having all of these dancers together from these four different companies taking class together on a daily basis. It was just amazing and I’m very proud of that.

Monica Holt: It was amazing. You all have so much to be proud of. You mentioned that it’s supposed to also happen in this upcoming season. Obviously amidst all of this momentum that we were building, I don’t think either of us foresaw the events of February 2025. You were really, for me, a key partner as we were trying to figure out how to protect artists, how to preserve relationships that we’d all spent so many years building. Can you just take me back in time for a minute to your February and what that moment was like for you and your team?

Jane Raleigh: I see most of that first few weeks from a removed perspective, almost like behind myself —

Monica Holt: Like floating above and watching it all happen. Totally.

Jane Raleigh: Yeah. And I have a lot of memories of our colleagues being on incredible emotional rollercoasters, people crying in the office, just that nervous energy and unknowingness of what would happen in the next hour. The first few weeks were really marked with a horrible sense of uncertainty and chaos. We didn’t know what was going on.

Monica Holt: As we have both worked at the center long enough to know what institutional change looks and feels like this was not that. And while we were doing a lot in that time to protect the staff, there’s also the artists that are the soul of the mission of the building. And I’m sure you had a lot of artists asking you directly, should we still trust the Kennedy Center? Is our engagement safe? Is our contract valid? These are relationships you and others had spent so many years cultivating. How did you answer those questions when you and I were not getting those answers ourselves?

Jane Raleigh: I think the approach I ended up taking was trying to remain as honest as possible and really not trying to convince anybody of anything, not convincing them to come, not convincing them not to come, but just laying out what we knew, laying out what we did not know. That’s what we had seen, what we hadn’t yet seen. And I will say in retrospect, a lot of the things we were really, really worried about at the beginning didn’t happen or didn’t happen in the way that we thought they would.

Monica Holt: No, I mean the leadership that came in, they didn’t know what a performing arts center was in a lot of ways. And so it took them quite a bit of time to really understand where they might want to affect change as propaganda in a cultural space.

You and I were a team, but also we had kind of different approaches and outlooks on the situation. I felt pretty strongly, pretty quickly that I needed to leave. I was in conversations with the new leadership constantly, and it was clear to me that if I stayed too long, I’d be demonstrating somehow that what had happened was normal and okay. But you definitely had an approach of wanting to stay as long as you could, as long as you were allowed to. I am curious a little bit since I left at the beginning of May, if that calculus changed or shifted over time and what that experience felt like over the past several months.

Jane Raleigh: Yes, A few things about why I felt I really had to stay. One is something fundamental about the business of the dance field and how it is different than some of these other genres that get presented at the Kennedy Center. As we were talking about way at the beginning, the Kennedy Center presents more dance than basically any other presenter. And dance companies, especially larger dance companies, really don’t tour that much. It’s not the same model as a national touring Broadway show. I felt very strongly that if I were to leave, it would be very easy for the new leadership to just erase the whole season that we had programmed. And if we gave up the platform, the platform may never be the same. And so there was a certain part of it for me about preserving the stage for the artists to have it whether they wanted it or not.

And I really tried to never have judgment of if the artists wanted to leave or if the artists wanted to stay, but very conscious of international artists coming in and if they have booked two years in advance, a four stop tour in the US and one of those stops pulls out. They don’t have the finances to just fill a gap of a week in touring. So that was one really clear piece of it to me that as long as I can protect the platform, it’s worth it. I do want to also own that. The dance field was very supportive of me and our team, and there definitely was a turning point for me personally in June when our whole team went to the Dance USA conference in Chicago, and we were in Chicago for four days with a huge swath of our national colleagues. And much of what I did at that meeting was like, do you hate me? Am I crazy? Am I doing something wrong to the field for staying? Should I leave? Should I stay? Should I leave? And pretty universally, we heard from people in the field, if you can stand it to be there, it’s valuable to the field for you to be there.

And I know that other programming colleagues at the center did not receive that same reaction from their fields. And so knowing that the dance field was behind us theoretically was a huge reason to continue doing the work.

Monica Holt: And so important. The notion of being of service in these roles is really critical. But then we get to August 21st. In case anyone doesn’t know, Jane and the dance programming team were fired from the Kennedy Center. I want to kind of understand the human experience of that. So you get, I assume five minutes notice, you’re pulled into hr. What was going through your mind as you walked into the office?

Jane Raleigh: It was definitely one of those moments where logically what’s happening, but the emotions of it having caught up to you and you’re just like, this can’t really be happening. But I know that it’s happening because as soon as you walk in and you see who’s sitting from HR at the table, you’re like, oh, we’re definitely getting fired right now. I think long term expected that this would happen at some point short term, it happening on that day came totally out of left field to me. So that element of certainly never left leadership’s toolbox

Monica Holt: Openly, the discussion has been around, you were told to make programming more commercial. All these quotes about maybe So You Think You Can Dance at the Kennedy Center was the direction you wanted to go. I think those of us in the field know that that’s all pretty much bullshit because your programming, as we’ve talked about, always included a balance of very mainstream traditional ballet in the mix of contemporary, but also these are New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, Alvin Alley, these aren’t obscure companies. These aren’t obscure ideas. This is about as mainstream as American dance gets. What do you think was really being asked when they said more commercial dance programming?

Jane Raleigh: Listen, I think, and I stand by, if my season as it existed was going to be able to go on without cancellation, sure, let’s get a little Dancing with the Stars. Let’s get a little So You Think You Can Dance. I think I had budgeted that two or three years ago to try to find —

Monica Holt: Yeah, that’s what I was — we even talked about it from an and perspective.

Jane Raleigh: Yeah.

Monica Holt: Sure. What would it be like if we also brought something fun, right? Yeah.

Jane Raleigh: More commercially popular.

Monica Holt: There we go.

Jane Raleigh: Not necessarily that the style is commercial, but that people who are not dance people off the streets might buy a ticket. Yeah, I don’t really think that that’s what they were looking for. I think they were looking for more money. And so I think that we would never have been successful because the new leadership fundamentally lacks an understanding of the business of the arts, and especially the business of dance. There are dance shows I can count on one hand that are financially profitable in the way that a Broadway show can be.

Monica Holt: Right. To your point, it’s about that fundamental misunderstanding of a business model, right? Nonprofit art exists because ticket revenue against the expense of creating art does not always net zero or net positive. And that’s why there is support from donors, from foundations, from corporations that is all part of the business model. So if you’re not looking at that support function, then you’re not understanding the business as a whole, and therefore you’re not evaluating success adequately.

Jane Raleigh: Yes, and I think it’s critically important to note that the Kennedy Center in this moment is not functioning in a successfully normal nonprofit business model either because all the reports that are in the news about subscribers pulling out their subscriptions, ticket sales being lower than what they normally are, donors pulling their donations, those things are all true. And so even if we were to model something that would be net positive in a normal Kennedy Center environment, we’re not functioning in a normal Kennedy Center environment.

Monica Holt: It no longer exists. I would estimate that we’re at around a hundred people who have either left or been fired from the center since February. I think we’ve both been watching our colleagues, our friends, navigate the upheaval. How are you processing, watching an institution you love and certainly one that you’ve called home for over a decade go through this kind of transformation, particularly now that you’re on the outside?

Jane Raleigh: Yeah. For me it is. I don’t know that I have processed what’s happening to the building or the institution as an idea That might come later, but for me, I think it is about the people who have called it home and also the artists who have considered it and counted it home. I think one of the most personally challenging days for me was actually when Alvin Ailey decided they would not be coming. That was a blow to the institutional history that I felt — continue to feel deeply. But there has been, if there’s any silver lining to be taken, the way that the takeover of the Kennedy Center brought staff together and reconnected, former staff who had chosen to leave years ago with current staff in the building, that has been incredible.

Monica Holt: It’s been absolutely remarkable.

Jane Raleigh: People reaching out, but also gathering in Washington to be together, getting food, getting drinks, and a lot of them are government workers now. People have gone to the NEA, now they’re also leaving these other federal institutions that has been amazing and that they cannot take ever from us.

Monica Holt: No, no, they can’t. I mean, I don’t go a couple weeks without seeing folks talking to them, gathering. I would shout out to former colleagues who very quickly after this happened, started a group online to help folks who were getting fired, frankly, find jobs in the arts. And those were folks who had left the institution a couple years ago. So it’s been a really beautiful thing. And truly this idea that community knits us together always, and that’s what we have to protect the most right now, whether that’s in our personal or professional lives or where those intersect is so true. I think in that vein, your response to being fired has been so gracious. You’ve encouraged people to keep supporting Kennedy Center artists and staff, but even further, your commitment to the DC dance community is completely unwavering, which of course I would, but it’s also brilliant to see, and you’ve launched DC Dance Network. So tell me a little bit about the vision. What is the gap you’re trying to fill that didn’t exist before?

Jane Raleigh: Yes. I’m so proud to have launched DC Dance Network. The concept really comes out of looking at and experiencing the DC dance field for the last decade that I’ve been here as a professional, I made a map about six to eight months ago of a timeline of resources that used to exist specifically for local artists and then put in green new resources that got added over time and in red resources that went away over time. And basically starting six years ago, it’s all red. Things have only gone away. There hasn’t been anyone putting new resource into the community. So that’s really the nascency of the idea. But then the reason that it’s called DC Dance Network is this notion of everyone in DC who works in the DC dance field. I would say 80% of them all have day jobs doing other professional skills where they make their money and then their dance is like at a professional level, but it is a side gig that they do or a hustle where they have to raise their own money to do the thing. And so our dance network is also filled with graphic designers and stage managers and costume seamstresses and administrators and accountants and lawyers who are dancers, but don’t get recognized in the dance room for all those other professional skills that they have and don’t get monetary resource for their dance work.

Monica Holt: This is excellent, really excellent. Thinking about supporting a community on so many different fronts, how do you see this type of grassroots organizing, complimenting or perhaps replacing institutional support, particularly in a time like this?

Jane Raleigh: I feel there’s been a mantra circulating lately as all the changes across the country have been happening around really like, do you know your neighbor? If you needed help get driving to the hospital, could you knock on your neighbor’s door and they would drive you? How many, if you got arrested at a protest, whose phone number could you call that would actually help you? And so while that’s sort of a macro thing, thinking about it in the arts field has really been driving the approach to the DC Dance Network. And I think it’s something that can replace institutions because in institutional world, you’re relying on resource that you don’t control. Whereas in a community network, we are all stewards of the resource, and it’s all about actually trusting that the person with the money or the space or whatever the resource is, that the person who has that resource will steward it honestly and steward it well and divvy it up in an equitable way. So first you have to build that trust in relationships with,

Monica Holt: That’s very, very well put. I would imagine knowing you, this is something that’s been on your mind for some time. When did you start really thinking about DC Dance Network and how has that evolved and what do you hope it grows into in the future?

Jane Raleigh: Yeah. I found my notebook that I’d been using to plan DC Dance Network stuff, and the first page I had dated September of 2024.

Monica Holt: Oh, wow.

Jane Raleigh: So it’s been about a year of real true planning. And I think one of the main things I’ve been trying to encourage myself to do is to not be so precious about having everything tied up in a beautiful bow. That’s definitely a institutional thing that’s ingrained in me is like we can’t do a thing unless it’s definitely confirmed at a certain level. And so that has been freeing, but also powerful for me to see, let me just experiment and do this thing. And then the amount that people are actually responding to it encourages me to keep going. As I think about further future, I’m also trying not to be too precious about it. I’m really trying to take the approach of we can experiment. We can do something for one year or two years or three years, and then if the community feedback is no longer serving us, we can stop doing that thing and we can do a different thing and we can follow what the community needs really are. We can follow where the excitement really is and we don’t have to be bound to a certain vision.

Monica Holt: How can folks who want to learn more or support DC Dance Network get involved?

Jane Raleigh: Yes, there is at this point an Instagram, which is just DC Dance Network on Instagram. You can sign up to be on my email list, so you will get updates. And then our first project has been launched. So any choreographers who live in the DMV, please look. We have launched a new small commission. Applications are due October 5th, and that will culminate into performances at Dance Place. So local choreographers should dive right in and apply.

Monica Holt: Love it. Looking ahead, what gives you hope about the future of dance and arts programming in this moment?

Jane Raleigh: The way that people have responded to each other in the moment gives me hope. The day I got fired, I spoke to half of the field dance with people calling and texting and reaching out on social media, and I really did not expect that. And we say a lot that the field is really small, and sometimes that can be frustrating because it feels like opportunities are limited, but in this moment, that feels important and powerful. We can actually step up to help each other and that we actually want to, that people care enough to reach out, says a lot.

Monica Holt: Absolutely. For other arts administrators listening who might be facing their own institutional pressures, whether that’s political, financial, otherwise, what advice might you share about navigating with integrity? Integrity while still taking risks and innovating?

Jane Raleigh: What I have really come to believe is that if you know your own integrity and you are true and loud about your own values, other people will see that. And if you have been honest in building the relationships that you have, that will only remain true if people will know you in a way that you know yourself.

Monica Holt: Very, very well put. Very well said. Okay, we’re going to move to our quickfire culture questions.

Jane Raleigh: I’m ready.

Monica Holt: What is one piece of culture that you are currently obsessing over?

Jane Raleigh: It is a Netflix original anime called Aggretsuko. She’s a little red panda who works in a terrifying office environment with bad bosses and bad colleagues, and she tries to be a really upright citizen and worker, and every time she’s about to lose her mind, she goes to karaoke and she sings Death Metal about ‘down with the bosses,’ and then she goes back to the office and she’s like a perfect employee. 15 minute episodes, it’s on Netflix. It’s amazing.

Monica Holt: Okay. This could be life changing. Thank you so much for sharing that. I cannot wait to go explore. If you could go back in time, what is one performance event or concert that you would like to be present at?

Jane Raleigh: Today that feels like the original Diaghilev’s Right of Spring where people set the theater on fire and totally shut it down because they were so outraged by the arts.

Monica Holt: The power of the arts to create explosive reactions. What is one free resource that everyone should check out?

Jane Raleigh: It’s a blog and Substack run by Andrew Taylor, who is the director of the Arts Management program at American University. It’s called Arts Managed, and he sends out once a week, there’s lots of stuff on his blog, but sends out once weekly dispatches from the arts management world about just little nuggets of things to think about.

Monica Holt: Okay, amazing. Arts managed. Got it. And then finally, your CI to Eye moment. If you could broadcast one message to executive directors, leadership teams, staff, and boards of thousands of arts organizations, what would that message be?

Jane Raleigh: I would challenge all of those people to have one additional one-on-one conversation today with a staff member who works on your team with a community member, with an artist. Just check in with them, ask how they’re doing, listen to what they need and really listen to what they tell you.

Monica Holt: A wonderful piece of advice and something we all can do today. Jane, thank you so much for being here. It is always just wonderful to see you and catch up, but I really appreciate you taking the time right now. We are all cheering you on. We are all going to go follow DC Dance Network on Instagram, and we cannot wait to see what you’re up to over the next several months.

Jane Raleigh: Thank you.

Monica Holt: Thank you for listening to CI to Eye with Monica Holt. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, please take a moment to rate us or leave a review. A nice comment goes a long way in helping other people discover the show and hear from leaders in the arts and beyond. If you haven’t already, please click the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. We’ve got some pretty incredible episodes coming your way, and I wouldn’t want you to miss them. This episode was edited and produced by Karen McConarty and co-written by Karen McConarty and myself, Monica Holt. Stephanie Medina and Jess Berube are our incredible designers and video editors. Our music is by whoisuzo. Don’t forget to follow CI on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok for regular content to help you market smarter. You can also sign up for CI’s newsletter at capacityinteractive.com and you’ll never miss an update and you can always reach out to let us know who you’d like to hear next from on CI to Eye.