the29.art is a collective of self-identified women working in the arts – painters, sculptors, dancers, filmmakers, writers, poets, performance artists, gallery owners, directors, critics, auction house experts, and philanthropists - who support each other’s work by sharing information, studio opportunities, gallery spaces, collaborating, creating panel discussions, finding greater representation, funding, and equity in pay and exposure.

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the29.art was formerly known as TEN-ish.com. The 29 represents the number of participants as of March 13, 2023.

JANET PANETTA

JANET PANETTA

JANET PANETTA
Dance, Performance, Professor, Diva

PERFORMER, BALLET MISTRESS, DIVA

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Photo Susan Salinger

Part One

When you discover your desire to be a  ballet dancer you are very young. Your ideas are naive and formed early.  You accept the hierarchy as the norm.  The goal is to be at the top in order to be free.  There is a uniformity in look and mindset.  But that meant I had to hide my personality to move up in the ballet world.  I did it and accomplished my childhood dream by making myself into one of the most technically accomplished ballet dancers in the professional world. The real feat, however, was in the artistry that came after the technique.  Sometimes freedom is scary, especially after years of rigorous training, but I found the confidence to break out and pursue something yet unknown.

Luckily classical ballet is a short lived career, and mine was extremely short.  As I came of age I saw different elements in the movement world that started to entice me.  Not only different movements and different bodies, but different personalities that were encouraged to be seen.  I was able to be me finally.  Before I had a fear of exposing who I was as a performer.  I could develop nuanced characters and skillfully hide myself in them.  But as I became a modern dancer, a post modern dancer and a contemporary artist I became more me.  And that is when I started to make my own work.  It was then that the hierarchy fell apart for me.  Not trying to please anyone else was the freedom.

Within creation I could be humorous, sarcastic, insecure, lost, and my own truth searcher.  Making work gives you hours to think, to expand your own subconscious, to write your own story.  And that is all it has to be, your own.

Most artists make art to feel whole.  It is only through creating that I know who I am.  I once ended an improvised solo saying, it was only in these moments on stage, with all the artifice, the lighting, the movement and even the costumes, that moments of truth exist, and all the other parts of life were a bad performance. But does my work contribute to humanity?  How does it allow me to be a human being, like any other on earth?  I never could answer that. Perhaps the function of art, as Aristotle told us, is catharsis.  

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As the years have passed and the performances are fewer I search for what makes me an artist.  If I don’t have a form to express myself, if I don’t have anything to say, how can I still recognize myself?  Something still persists in me that makes me think how I see, how I react, and what I choose to be important to me makes me an artist even if I do not create anything anymore.  I don’t wish to be confrontational but I am.  I simply do not think like other people.  My reactions to situations are unlike other peoples.  My feelings in relationships are not like others.  I cannot believe in politeness, in lying to others or to myself.  It makes me stand alone and that is a very lonely position.  It confuses those I love and keeps them from loving me.  I am so misunderstood.  Poor me!      

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Part Two

 Teaching isn’t about the teacher.  Maybe some parts are performative, but the essence is being able to immerse yourself in the students’ needs and helping them to fulfill their goals, not yours.  In teaching I just knew I could transmit all the information I had and possibly help other artists become the artists they wanted to be.  Finally I could combine being an artist with helping humanity somehow.  I could be a team player, I could be on their team.  

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 Function as Beauty: Here I am, a dance teacher, and the shape of a body means nothing to me. I knew the way I saw bodies could free my students from the anxiety they might have about their own looks. By showing them the beauty in function: the exhilaration in executing a perfect pirouette, even the placement of a dévelopé à la seconde: would liberate them physically and emotionally.

JANET PANETTA
Dance, Performance, Professor, Diva
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JANET PANETTA

From a young age, Janet Panetta studied ballet with Margaret Craske, Antony Tudor and Alfredo Corvino at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School. At 14, she became Margaret Craske’s teaching assistant, which served as on-the-job training for her lifelong career in dance education.
Janet joined American Ballet Theatre in 1968, and later began her foray into modern dance.

In the 1980s, she began working internationally, and in 1984 the French government asked Janet to be the only ballet teacher at their newly created school for contemporary dancers. Her class consisted of twenty students, all of whom went on to professional careers, including the renowned choreographer Jerome Bel.

Janet currently works with P.A.R.T.S. (Brussels) and with Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wupperthal. In addition, she teaches at Impulstanz in Vienna each summer. From 1973-2010 she maintained her own New York Studio, where she served as artistic director of International Dance Dialogues, a program that hosts many European artists workshops and lectures, and which she continues to direct.

REBECCA SHAPASS

REBECCA SHAPASS
PAMELA SNEED

PAMELA SNEED