Late last month, Dance Place—one of Washington, DC’s premier performing arts and dance education centers—fired its artistic director, Tariq O’Meally. An unsigned emailed statement, released a week after O’Meally’s firing by executive director André Mazelin, read: “Dance Place has restructured its staffing model and is reimagining its approach to presentation programming in response to a dramatically contracting public funding environment and its commitment to operating with both efficiency and deeper community ownership.” Mazelin and the board of directors’ co-chairs noted they would make no further comments.
O’Meally, who joined Dance Place full-time in June 2024, says he learned that his role as artistic director was eliminated on May 28 via Google Meet. The Dance Place statement said that artistic decision-making will instead be supported by Mazelin and managed by members of an artist advisory council. That group consists of seven locally based dancemakers and arts administrators, including choreographer and Dance Place faculty member Sarah Beth Oppenheim. “As part of the curatorial advisory committee,” Oppenheim says, “I was not consulted in the restructuring, and I do not condone it.”
Within hours of learning of O’Meally’s firing, a group of DC-area dance professionals released a petition condemning the elimination of the artistic director position. On the morning of June 12, the petition was delivered to the board. “We believe that the new ‘restructuring’ of Dance Place is not moving the organization forward,” says a cover letter obtained by Dance Magazine, signed by founding director emerita Carla Perlo, co-director emerita Deborah Riley, former executive artistic director Christopher K. Morgan, and former chair of the board of directors Jannes Gibson. “The current leadership has been opaque, unwelcoming, unsupportive of its staff and has outsourced crucial aspects of operations.” The group asked for a town hall meeting with the board in order to hear testimony from current and former Dance Place staff, students, and patrons—to be held no later than July 17, prior to Mazelin’s previously scheduled new season announcement.
“This feels apocalyptic,” says Oppenheim, a member of this ad hoc group. “Dance Place could go under.”
Founded by Perlo and Steve Bloom in 1978, Dance Place has served as a cultural anchor in the region for nearly 50 years. “There is no other place like it here,” says Sali Ann Kriegsman, a former director of Jacob’s Pillow and the National Endowment for the Arts Dance Program. “It’s a living room for the dance community in the DC area.” At one point the 144-seat black-box studio theater supported more than 40 weekends of dance performances annually, while offering dance classes in a range of styles plus popular summer youth programs for neighborhood kids. The center has also hosted artistic residents, including Koma Otake, Raja Feather Kelly, Dianne McIntyre, Ephrat Asherie, and Rosie Herrera.
Artist-founded organizations often face uncertainty when the founding artistic director moves on. Co-director emerita Riley says that wasn’t the case when she and Perlo retired in 2017. “We were leaving the organization in great shape,” Riley says, citing a balanced budget, an experienced staff, and a renovated building. “That was our legacy to the community.”
The center faced pandemic-related challenges under Morgan, its next artistic/executive director. O’Meally—who has worked extensively as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher in the DC area—says that when he became artistic director in 2024, “I understood Dance Place to be a community center that specializes in interacting with the community.” Though the center lost a $70,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant last year, “I’m really proud that we kept the programming going,” O’Meally says. “I still found ways to maintain the integrity of my commitment to support artists in a time when funding was contracting.” During his brief tenure, he redesigned the center’s presentation series and other programs, and spearheaded the organization’s 45th-anniversary showcase honoring Perlo, Riley, and two other notable female dance leaders in the DC area.
Perlo says keeping the organization vibrant and financially sound was never easy, but it always required an artist at the helm. “Great arts institutions come from visionary artistic leaders,” Perlo says, “who work closely with executive directors to uplift, inspire, inform, protect, and listen to their staff members.”
O’Meally recently released a bittersweet statement on Instagram. “Our families, our communities, our art…are always under construction, completion nowhere in sight,” it reads. “But it is vital that we persevere…because our fates are inextricably linked.”
