July 31st: Community Engagement Artists and Creatives Grant, December 31st: New England Presenter Travel Fund, December 31st: Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet Scholarship, December 31st: 24 Seven Dance Convention, December 31st: National Theater Project Presenter Travel Grant, December 31st: Breck Creek Artist-in-Residence Program
Read the following excerpt from The New Yorker‘s Goings On About Town, written by dance critic and writer Marina Harss. DDP gets a shoutout within her recommendation of the Guggenheim Works & Process this Sunday (a discussion of the experience of women choreographers of color in dance).
The dearth of ballets choreographed by women is a matter of record—a new group called Dance Data Project has calculated that less than twenty per cent of the ballets that premièred in 2018-19 were made by women, and works created by women of color represents a tiny fraction of that. Dance Lab New York and the Joyce Theatre Foundation have partnered to create a Choreographic Lab, designed specifically to offer opportunities to this grossly underrepresented demographic. At the Guggenheim, four choreographers who have taken part in the lab—Margarita Armas, Courtney Cochran, Amy Hall Garner, and Preeti Vasudevan—show their work and discuss the challenges of breaking out in this male-dominated field.
MARINA HARSS
See the full list of Goings On About Town in The New Yorker.
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The Seattle Times: At Pacific Northwest Ballet and elsewhere, female choreographers are a rarity — but that’s changing
By Moira Macdonald
31 October 2019
On an autumn afternoon in a cavernous Pacific Northwest Ballet studio, something brand-new was slowly beginning to take shape. Choreographer Eva Stone, whose ballet, “F O I L,” will make its world premiere as part of the “Locally Sourced” program in November, watched intently as a group of PNB’s female dancers settled into her work, memorizing it in their bodies.
“It’s almost like your hearts are beating in unison,” she said of the delicate movements of a trio. Urging the dancers to immerse themselves in each moment, Stone reminded them that the steps were actually uncomplicated. “The magnificence,” she said, “is in you.”
Just the quiet, everyday miracle of art and bodies, but there was something unusual going on that day.
Though we often think of ballet in terms of women — pointe shoes, tutus, swan queens — female choreographers are relatively rare in the ballet world, and local female choreographers at PNB are even rarer. Stone, a Seattle-based dance-maker and producer (she curates the annual dance festival, “CHOP SHOP: Bodies of Work,” and is artistic director of the Stone Dance Collective), is making her PNB debut as a choreographer. She’s one of only five women whose choreography has been seen on PNB’s mainstage in the last five seasons, along with Twyla Tharp, Crystal Pite, Jessica Lang and Robyn Mineko Williams. In that same time frame, 27 men have presented their work.
…
While ballet company rosters tend to be slightly majority-female (PNB currently has 47 dancers on its roster, 27 of whom are women), the statistics for those who create the dances tell another story. The Dance Data Project, which examined the top 50 American ballet companies, found that for the 2018-19 season, 81 percent of the works performed by those companies was choreographed by men; for 2019-20, that figure was 79 percent. PNB’s average is in the same neighborhood — over the past five seasons, 83 percent of the works on its stage have been choreographed by men.
“Locally Sourced,” a Pacific Northwest Ballet program featuring three world-premiere ballets from local choreographers: “F O I L” by Eva Stone, “Love and Loss” by Donald Byrd,” and “Wash of Grey” by Miles Pertl. Nov. 8-17, McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St., Seattle; $37-$190; 206-441-2424, pnb.org
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In ‘BB@home: ChoreograpHER,’ The Women Of The Boston Ballet Show Ingenuity And Talent
By Sharon Basco
25 October 2019
When you look at ballet you enjoy the movement, the shape of the dance, the performers, and, if there is any, the music and the story. You may marvel at the dancers’ skill, strength, artistry and charisma. Chances are, you don’t immediately focus on the person who created the work.
But now, for very good reasons, the ballet world is thinking about who makes its dances.
Historically, it’s overwhelmingly a male domain, with most ballet companies going year after year without a single piece made by a woman. In the 2012-2013 season, U.S. ballet troupes with budgets exceeding $5 million staged some 290 ballets. Just 25 of those were choreographed by women, according to research compiled by the Cincinnati Enquirer. According to a new research organization called the Dance Data Project, men will choreograph some 79 percent of works this season.
The Boston Ballet is trying to strike a more even balance. They’ve given female dancers the time and opportunity to create short ballets. This effort, called “ChoreograpHER,” presents its second season this week (it’s sold out) featuring six pieces by female company members. The venue is the small but well-appointed theater in the company’s South End headquarters.
It was a delight and privilege for DDP founder & president Liza Yntema to attend a preview of Boston Ballet’s BB@home: Choreographer showing on Wednesday.
The performance on Thursday is sold out, and will present new works by Principal Dancer Lia Cirio, Soloist Chyrstyn Fentroy, Second Soloist Lauren Herfindahl, and Artists Sage Humphries, Abigail Merlis, and Joy Womack.
Following the preview showing, Liza was able to meet the artists and take a quick picture before her travels south to Washington, D.C. for The Washington Ballet’s NEXTsteps performance on Thursday.
From L to R, Chyrstyn Fentroy, Liza Yntema, Helen Pickett, Lauren Herfindahl, Lia Cirio, Sage Nicole Humphries, and Abigain Merlis.
We know some of our followers don’t have the time to read our full reports right away – that’s why DDP maintains a document of our most interesting findings. You can read the 2019 Highlights now for all the facts. Click the link below to download.
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Dance Data Project® released its sixth comprehensive report today, this time examining gender equity in spring/summer dance festival leadership and programming. For the first time in a DDP study, women make up a sizable majority in the category of artistic direction. As always, sources and limitations are cited at the end of the report.
Each semester, the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership (EGAL), at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, offers a Consulting Projects Course. This fall, DDP is one of the select organizations participating in this course in which students are presented with a company’s unique issue, problem, or decision that is critical to advancing that organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
As DDP grows, we need help meeting demands for more data and insight into the roles gender equity plays in the dance community. Furthermore, our team is committed to benefiting from academic insight and learning the latest methods in data analysis and academic research.
We are pleased to announce that second-year MBA student Patrick Crocker will be working on our project in the EGAL course. Patrick’s expertise comes from 10 years on active duty in the U.S. Army as a Judge Advocate and heavy exposure to dance from growing up backstage at his aunt’s dance studio performances, to working as an accompanist for dance classes at Texas Christian University, and to collaborating with the University of Richmond dance department during law school. Patrick will consider two topics of interest, examining either major ballet venues or company-affiliated ballet schools in the United States, defining the scope of their market and revealing the gender distribution in leadership and programming. This project is tailored to develop a usable product of interest to both the dance world and leaders in gender equity, as well as to the general public.
The DDP team would like to thank Larissa Roesch, who introduced our founder, Liza, to this project and Jennifer Wells, Program Director of EGAL for making the collaboration possible. We look forward to sharing the results of this collaboration with our community in the coming months!
About Patrick
Patrick is currently a full-time MBA student at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley (class of 2020). Prior to Berkeley, Patrick spent a decade in the U.S. Army as a Judge Advocate, mostly practicing in the criminal, operational, and intelligence law fields. He is originally from Texas and has been involved with dance off and on throughout his life, including working as an accompanist for the dace department at Texas Christian University during undergrad and writing/performing music for the dance department at the University of Richmond during law school. He is thrilled to be able to contribute to the amazing work DDP is doing to support equity initiatives in classical ballet.
Learn more about Berkeley Haas’ Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership here.
https://ddp-wordpress.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/13142018/Asset-2.png296600Isabelle Vailhttps://www.dancedataproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/DDP_logo_Primary.pngIsabelle Vail2019-09-17 09:23:592019-09-17 09:26:09DDP Takes Part in Consulting Projects Course of Berkeley Haas’ Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership
If there is one occupation in which it seems women should have an equal shot of making it to leadership roles, it is ballet. From a young age, far more girls than boys are interested in ballet, so much so that girls are estimated to outnumber boys 20-to-1 in ballet classes. Yet when it comes to leadership, there’s a shocking gender gap in favor of men.
The Data Dance Project (DDP), an organization dedicated to promoting equity in classical ballet, examined leadership and salary data for artistic directors at the top 50 ballet companies in the United States—and their findings are pretty shocking. Artistic directors are often former dancers, and they have the final say on artistic decisions like how a step may be performed or how a show will transition from one piece to the next. According to DDP, a whopping 72% of ballet companies have a male artistic director. Those women who do get the title of artistic director earn only 68 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts. Sadly, only one woman made it onto DDP’s top ten list of the highest paid artistic directors.
The gender bias in choreography is even worse. DDP found that in the 2018-19 ballet season, men choreographed 81% of all works performed by the top 50 ballet companies. Of the 467 works announced for the 2019-20 season, 79% will be choreographed by men.
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The great choreographer George Balanchine famously said, “Ballet is woman.” But an overwhelming majority of top jobs in classical dance on both the artistic and executive side are held by men, and the artistic vision presented — to a female-dominated audience — is similarly male, including re-treads of sexist stereotypes and an alarming number of ballets that include scenes of sexual violence and degradation.
I founded Dance Data Project four years ago to document and raise awareness about the lack of opportunities for female choreographers as well as the gender imbalance in artistic and administrative leadership in dance organizations. Our research has found that women hold only three of the artistic director jobs in the largest 10 companies in the U.S. (their combined revenue of $435 million exceeds the next 40 combined by approximately $125 million). Despite the fact that girls outnumber boys 20 to one and pay most of the fees in ballet schools, and despite the audience and donor base being 70% women, female artistic directors are paid 68 percent of what their male counterparts earn. The imbalance is even more pronounced when it comes to what you see on stage. For the 2018–2019 and 2019–2020 seasons of work in the top 50 ballet companies in the U.S., a stunning 81% and 79% (respectively) of work is choreographed by men.
In 2018–2019, 70% of entire evening programs are exclusively male, and in the upcoming season 62% are — in other words, an exact inverse proportion of audience and donor base to works seen on stage. Eighty-three percent of the most prestigious pieces, full evening ballets, will be by men.
I started DDP because as an audience member and a donor, I couldn’t fathom why all the works I saw were male, why the leadership and commissions and even the panels of experts at company pre- and post-show discussions I have attended featured men only. I sat at a dinner not too long ago, and every single choreographer in a long list mentioned as important, a worthy inspiration for the men on stage, was another man.
Why should we care? Well, ballet globally is a multibillion-dollar industry. In the U.S., tens of thousands of girls and women go off to class, perhaps only a few times, many on an almost daily basis. They are being trained in a culture that enforces compliance, silence, and unquestioning submission to authority. And ballet is just one art form that perpetuates an “impresario” system with little accountability or transparency, and almost no recourse for victims of discrimination or violence. Opera, symphonies, and theater have also been plagued by lack of opportunities for women (especially women and girls of color) and violence against the vulnerable.
Ironically, it was women who originally were the powers in ballet in the United States. As Sharon Basco noted in her 2015 article “Where Are the Women in Ballet?” of the eight ballet companies launched in 1963 with a $7.7 million Ford Foundation grant, most were helmed by women who were ballet school directors. As the budgets grew, however, the women have been pushed out. That is now true even at ballet schools as salaries have risen. When I asked Alexei Moskalenko, assistant artistic director of the Youth America Grand Prix, why the overwhelming majority of the judges at the prestigious international scholarship competition are male, he said, “Well, that is because all the big ballet schools are run by men.”
Figures indicate declining and aging audiences for classical dance (a study by the Wallace Foundation found that only 3% of millennials had seen a classical ballet performance in the previous 12 months) and a real audience appetite for works by and the vision of women. Yet, the system is self-referential, with the hiring for plum commissions doled out on a who-knows-whom basis that reinforces an old boys’ network unchecked by outside rigor or opinions.
In giving the keynote address at Positioning Ballet 2019, the second Ballet Working Conference, an international symposium in the Netherlands, Theresa Ruth Howard, the founder and curator of MoBBallet (Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet), recommended a “12-step recovery program” for ballet, noting toxic ballet culture in which multiple reports of violence against women and lack of opportunities for leadership have been ignored. Howard, as so many critiques have detailed, cited a hierarchal system that enforces unquestioning obedience, particularly from women.
That certainly resonates with my experience. It is commonplace to hear artistic directors of the largest, most influential companies freely opine publicly that women cannot be choreographers, for the most risible, blatantly illogical reasons, including “Women don’t want to choreograph, they just want to have babies and dance” (told to me at a company fundraiser) or this gem from a recent gala, reported by a woman well known for her advocacy for women in finance: “Women cannot choreograph because they are used to being lifted on stage, so they cannot see what’s going on behind them.” Nope, not making it up. Alexei Ratmansky, who as the in-house choreographer for American Ballet Theatre has immense influence, stated on Facebook in 2017 that there is no equality in ballet, and he is fine with that, it is simply part of the tradition and the way things are.
There are some notable and encouraging exceptions in the big companies. An extraordinary and unprecedented 100% of world premieres announced this summer to be featured in American Ballet Theatre’s 2019–2020 season will be work choreographed by women. ABT stands alone among the big companies by investing so heavily in new work. ABT’s Artistic Director Kevin McKenzie has made a multiyear, multilevel commitment to bringing new voices to the stage by working with female choreographers from every level — black box short pieces to full evening main stage productions. This alleviates the anxiety I have heard from so many female choreographers that if they don’t hit it out of the park every single damn time, they will never work again.
However, the most innovative work, which will keep classical dance relevant and younger audiences excited, is being done outside of the big companies, by the second companies in big cities or by regional ballets staging more interesting “contemporary ballet” by women. Smaller companies led by women — BalletX in Philadelphia (Christine Cox), the Cincinnati Ballet (Victoria Morgan) and Dayton Ballet (Karen Russo Burke), the extraordinary Amy Seiwert at Sacramento Ballet, the 40-year veteran Stoner Winslett of Richmond Ballet, as well as newcomer Hope Muir in Charlotte — are producing great work to enthusiastic audiences.
Dance Data Project’s July report did find an encouraging trend: Women are obtaining more commissions to create for the shorter, mixed repertory programs in top 50 companies. Thirty-eight percent of single-act world premieres announced to date for the 2019–2020 season will be by women. In the past season, 2018–2019, 45% of the non–main-stage world premieres were choreographed by women. But both trends underline what dance scholar, Barnard Professor Lynn Garafola has noted: that companies are unwilling to trust women with big, expensive productions.
But to really address disparity in leadership in ballet, we need to change how girls in ballet are encouraged to think of themselves: not as fungible automatons, but as future artists. Eva Stone, who has been a teacher and choreographer for 30 years, persuaded Peter Boal, the artistic director at Pacific Northwest Ballet, to start an intensive in choreography for 14- to 16-year-old girls. Programs like these are critical because girls become serious about ballet at about the same time that they stop speaking in class: a double cultural whammy. And in a lovely gesture, completely upending typical ballet norms, Boal offered up his own choreography to the class for critique and feedback.
So what can we do?
Female audiences, donors, and students continue to support an art form that routinely marginalizes women in all respects. The best chance for real change is for audiences to insist on equity, and to invest their money in companies that are paying women fairly, hiring more women in leadership positions, and showcasing the work of women choreographers. Even female board members who are senior executives at banks and venture capital and accounting firms with active diversity programs often don’t push back. One exception is Alison Quirk, a member of the board of trustees of Boston Ballet. She and another female board member advocated for the establishment of ChoreograpHER at Boston Ballet, a program that showcases choreography by female company members.
Ballet is behind the times and tone deaf. It’s not going to change unless those of us sitting in the seats, board members, critics, and audiences force it to do so. If you want to make an affirmative effort to support female artists, here are some names, besides Twyla Tharp, to look for: Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Jessica Lang, Crystal Pite, Helen Pickett, Pam Tanowitz, Melissa Barak, Amy Seiwert, Gemma Bond, Gianna Reisen, Lauren Lovette, Stephanie Martinez, Toni Pimble, Celia Fushille, Virginia Johnson, Penny Saunders.
Liza would like to note that Celia Fushille, Virginia Johnson, and Toni Pimble are three artists she would move up from the “names to look for” list at the end of this Op-Ed and relocate to the paragraph detailing female artistic directors. (See paragraph beginning with, “However, the most innovative work, which will keep classical dance relevant and younger audiences excited, is being done outside of the big companies, by the second companies in big cities or by regional ballets…”.
These women are leading extraordinary companies and initiatives. Celia Fushille leads Smuin Ballet, which was founded by a man but now heavily supports the addition of female work. A founding member and principal dancer-turned-artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem, Virginia Johnson is also a leading advocate for African-American girls (and boys) entering the ballet world. Toni Pimble leads Eugene Ballet with major inclusion of female work (much of it her own), setting a standard for companies of the same size in the U.S. to commission more women and level their ratio of male v. female work in every season.
https://ddp-wordpress.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/13142534/IMG_1020.jpg504800Elizabeth Yntemahttps://www.dancedataproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/DDP_logo_Primary.pngElizabeth Yntema2019-09-06 11:53:432019-11-25 14:44:14Women’s Media Center Features DDP Founder’s Op-Ed
The following is a report on the gender distribution of repertoire within the Top 50 domestic companies’ 2018-2019 seasons. The data is separated into three subsections: Gender Distribution in Seasonal Repertoire, World Premieres, and Comparison of 2018-2019 Seasons to 2019-2020 Seasons. DDP cites sources and expresses limitations at the end of the report.
