Brand shakeup announced by Columbia City Ballet
Penchant for 'bigger, brighter, and better' drives change
For 62 years it was known as Columbia City Ballet, an anchor of the eponymous capital city's arts scene.


This year, International Ballet partnered with Freedom Within Walls at Lead Academy, the Phillis Wheatley Community Center and Pleasant Valley Connection to teach classes at different locations over the summer.
“We all know the social inequality gaps. Some of the children are not able to afford extended day enrichment activities," said Tara Scott, executive director and one of the founders of Freedom Within Walls. "The thing that we’re really excited about is being able to allow the arts in different extracurricular activities that, you know, they may not otherwise be afforded."
The story was even picked up nationally by NBC News. Click here to watch the WYFF story segment now. International Ballet got the leg up (groan) by virtue of landing (groan) a Summer Arts Education Project grant from the SCAC.For the first time since 2019, the Jam Room Music Festival is returning to Columbia's Main Street.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Titus Andronicus are the headliners for the event, set for October 1 with one stage on Main Street and another on Hampton Street in front of the Columbia Museum of Art.
Read the rest of Allen Wallace's coverage, with the full lineup, here.REGISTRATION DEADLINE: Tuesday, February 1, 2022
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Laura Kennedy, Furman University associate professor of musicology, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award to conduct research in Russia during the 2019/2020 academic year.
For her research project, “Ballet in a Waning Empire: Shostakovich, Lopukhov, and the Search for Soviet Dance,” Kennedy will work in music and dance archives in St. Petersburg and Moscow. She will research costumes, set designs, choreographic notes, musical scores, photographs and other materials from early Soviet ballet productions written in Leningrad in the 1920s and 1930s, a formative period of experimentation in the Russian arts.
Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright honor represents a national competition across the humanities, arts, sciences and education. Grantees undergo a rigorous peer-review process, in which proposals are evaluated in both the U.S. and destination countries and are finally selected by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
“I’m thrilled with the opportunity of this Fulbright and with the chance to pursue new research on Russian ballet. My goal is to author the first book ever written on the ballets of Dmitri Shostakovich: The Golden Age, The Bolt, and The Limpid Stream,” said Kennedy. “These early ballets set the direction of Soviet dance, ensuring ballet’s place as a central expression of Soviet cultural achievement and diplomacy in the 20th century.”