And we also have to look at the fact that a lot of the basis upon which we decide what is valuable work has a gender lens to it.

It’s important that we all speak up on behalf of each other, and advocate for women to get opportunities at every level. It’s not just not getting the opportunity to get in the door. They’re not getting the opportunities to keep moving through the ranks of the company, and that is about mentoring and advocacy on all of our behalf.

Ellevest Newsletter August 18,2020

If the world is to be saved, it will be the women who save it.

The way to build back is to put women straight at the center. Because guess what? They’re already at the center.

Our business culture lives, frankly, in the early-20th century with the Ozzie and Harriet narrative.

It’s just a false narrative that has for far too long served as a guiding principle of corporate America. And it has to change. So I don’t mind the slings and arrows because we need to move out of that old paradigm and shift into the 21st-century world we live in.

I think it’s very important that the world today be more open to and respectful of the need for working people to be able to prioritize their families, and not just their work.

Acknowledging and being okay with the fact that if you don’t have the confidence to believe in yourself on your own, that it’s something that you can gain … from having a support system around you. It’s been difficult for me throughout my life. And I know it’s difficult for a lot of young people to accept and understand that you can’t do everything on your own, and you’re going to have days when you’re not strong.

Q&A w/ Misty Copeland

But I do see a silver lining in all of this. I feel like now is the time for us to stop and breathe … and revamp how we connect with more people, how we reach communities that are not often included. To redefine how we reach people.

Q&A w/ Misty Copeland

I think we can create theaters in communities where there is no more excuse for not having a venue in these places, and allowing these communities to feel like we’re a part of them.

Q&A w/ Misty Copeland

Sometimes it just helps to just see somebody that looks like you.

No matter how hard it gets, stick your chest out, keep your head up and handle it.

Compared with other forms, ballet — the rich uncle on the dance family tree — is where much of the money and institutional power reside.

This art form that I love is undernourished and undervalued, full of inequity among forms and an uneven balance of power among funders, presenters, choreographers and — always last, though hopefully not for long — dancers.

The grit in my aesthetic is my agency—my child’s whisper and command for a more humane, liberated and compassionate reality.

It is also about lived experiences. In a properly constituted society, women wouldn’t do disproportionate amounts of child care work, but in this society they do. As a result, when you marginalize women from public life or roles in leadership, you are overweighting the experience of the non-primary caregiver — so is it an accident that we did bailouts for big corporations before we did any kind of child care help? If there were more women with young children in the Senate, it’s hard to think the Senate would make exactly the same decisions and have the same priorities it does now.

One of the great ironies of the fashion industry is that while it caters to and profits from women, it has never felt like an industry that supports them.

I am on a personal mission to help women, in particular, take charge of their financial lives.  We will never have full equality if we don’t have financial equality and I want to help us get there.  Let’s face it, it’s not rocket science – anyone can understand their financial situation – you just need the right person to explain it all to you (and maybe a good glass of wine.)

‘Celebrity Hacks’ from Alyssa Rapp’s Leadership & Life Hacks

Men are so often paid and compensated on the potential that they show, not necessarily what they’ve done and women are so often paid on what they’ve actually done — which normally I would say, we outperform what our contract was.

In that time there were not often two creators and not many women, either. It was hard for the system to understand that I wasn’t just [Paul Lightfoot’s] muse. Maybe sometimes he was my muse!

A lot of practices need to be questioned in ballet culture. It’s also societal expectations like motherhood & family. We’re seeing this now in the pandemic where overwhelmingly it’s women who are leaving the workforce bc they are the ones who are taking care of their families.

I know that women are more inclusive than mercurial, more patient than impatient, are more respectful than abrasive.

Ballet is a very traditional art form and is generally cautious about change, but I think this pandemic has pushed us forward in terms of how to reach our audience. Events of the last few months have also forced us to ask bigger questions and made us aware of ways we can be more inclusive and make people feel more a part of it.

I wish that an artistic director would announce the end of season programming, that anodyne calculus designed to appeal to a dwindling subscriber base. The older white demographic has long been the economic backbone of the American theater. But for reasons financial, cultural and democratic, the future depends on a more inclusive embrace.

Companies that don’t have a venue and therefore aren’t burdened by significant overhead may have an advantage in winning back reluctant theatergoers and in converting new ones. Work that can’t be found elsewhere, that is tailored not to the general marketplace but to specific communities, offers unique incentive.

In the theater of the not-so-distant future, companies that place artistic imperatives over institutional obligations will be better situated to reach new audiences. If this means fewer offerings of higher quality, I think the tradeoff will be welcome. Why should the arts follow the madness of the rest of the economy in worshipping an ever-expanding GDP? The days of business plan theater are over.

But ballet is beset by serious ailments that threaten its future in this country: American dancers are less likely than ever to hold the top rank in American companies. African Americans have dismal prospects of inclusion — of all of the nation’s performing arts, none is more segregated than ballet. And the companies are so cautious in their programming that they have effectively reduced an art form to a rotation of over-roasted chestnuts that no one can justifiably croon about.

Ballet suffers from a serious lack of confidence that is only growing more and more paralyzing.

Nowadays, the shaky economics of ballet drive the field continuously toward a standardized repertoire.

“I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. . . . Had I not killed her, she would have killed me.”

Where is the creativity in arts leadership, and who is championing change? Now is the chance to make significant and lasting changes industry wide. For the first time in recent history, all of the arts share a common problem, which presents a transformative opportunity to seek a new business model that can benefit all genres and move the industry into the twenty-first century.

We’re not crying because we can’t get into these spaces, we’re just saying what it’s like for us,” she said. “We don’t want special treatment. We just want the opportunity.

There’s been moments that I’ve said, ‘I’m done with this,’ but I think, ‘If I stop, then how’s the next generation going to get there?’

There are moments in real time when you’re offering something — on a stage in a dais, in an interview — where you become aware: ‘I’m going to experience a lot of vitriol for this’…I have to say, for this particular moment, I had not anticipated that because it was a framing that I have used many times before.

[I have] an interesting relationship with the word ‘power,’ and all I can think of is I just hope in my lifetime, I can help more women make more money. Financial stability is freedom.

We have to turn to our many talented girls and women to tackle the challenges we face today.

For dancers who exercise agency, crossing or confronting a ballet master can result in retaliation like verbal belittling or intimidation, and being presented as a “problem” to the director, affecting casting and ultimately their career trajectory.