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"The Devil Ties My Tongue" by Amy Seiwert performed for the SKETCH Series, 2013. Photo by David DeSilva. Courtesy of Amy Seiwert's Imagery
WBUR News: Where are the Women in Ballet?
18 September 2015
By Sharon Basco
When the Boston Ballet Company was founded 52 years ago, ballet was a matriarchy, and George Balanchine’s familiar quote “ballet is woman” made sense.
Boston’s was one of eight ballet companies started in cities across the U.S. — including Philadelphia, Houston and Washington D.C. — that were launched with a $7.7 million Ford Foundation grant in 1963. Created and nurtured by strong female artistic directors, these companies grew in size and stature, and all are thriving today. But the women leaders are gone; all of these troupes are headed by men. And the choreography is, with perhaps one exception per season, by men.
“I was staggered by the numbers,” said Boston Ballet’s artistic director Mikko Nissinen. “I’ve heard these numbers before — that there are so many fewer female choreographers — and I don’t have any answer to that, but it’s very interesting.”
Nissinen seems to have a better handle on why it was women who founded the ballet companies: “Those companies were born from the good regional ballet schools,” he said. That was the case with the Boston Ballet and its founding director, E. Virginia Williams. Energetic, indomitable and witty, she was quick with a riposte when told “Virginia, your dancers love you.” “They darn well better!” she’d reply.
Williams was just one of the determined women, all ballet school directors, who started companies with the Ford grant. “At that point these really good ballet schools were all run by women,” Nissinen continued, referring to Barbara Weisberger in Philadelphia, Mary Day in Washington, D.C. and Nina Popova in Houston. “Women who then naturally became the directors of the companies in the pioneering era. Right now it happens actually that lots of these companies are run by men.”
Academics recognize the absence of women in top artistic positions, as well as the absence of female choreographers chosen by ballet companies. Dance writers do, too, though they rarely write about it. One exception is Luke Jennings, who took on Britain’s ballet record in The Observer a few years ago:
“It’s 14 years since a woman was commissioned to create a main-stage ballet at the Royal Opera House. If this were true of women playwrights at the National Theatre, or female artists at the Tate, there would be outrage. But at the flagship institution of British dance, the omission has escaped public notice. As it did last summer when the Royal Ballet and the National Gallery launched a collaboration named “Metamorphosis: Titian 2012.” Of the 15 artists and choreographers involved, none was a woman. An ironic decision, given that the subject was the goddess Diana, the personification of feminine power.”
An icon of woman-power in choreography has, for the past 50 years, been Twyla Tharp. She has just begun a self-organized U.S. tour to celebrate the half-century mark since she, at age 23, started her own modern dance troupe. When she visited Boston earlier this year, I mentioned the absence of female choreographers on ballet company’s schedules, and she laughed.
“Really? Have you noticed?” Tharp said. “And how many famous painters, philosophers, musicians, some writers — it’s not a woman’s prerogative to be an artist. We all know women have a high hill to climb whatever they do, and the world of arts is very chauvinistic, and one knows that going in.”
It’s not just in the U.S. that men lead and choreograph the ballet troupes. “The world class companies, for the most part, are run by men,” said Lynn Garafola, a writer, scholar and founder of the Columbia University seminar Studies in Dance. And why are women leaders gone? “The more professional a company becomes, in my observation, the more likely women are going to disappear from the leadership positions, and they’re going to be replaced by men. I think this is very typical of organizations when they get larger, when they get more important.”
One of the few women in powerful positions — although on the business side, not where the artistic decisions are made — Rachel Moore leaves her CEO job at American Ballet Theatre on Oct. 5 to become president and CEO of the Los Angeles Music Center. Like everyone quoted in this story, Moore is a former professional dancer, so she speaks from her own experience.
“The men are able to get the more stable, the more solid jobs. For a variety of reasons. I think that it’s still a man’s world and for many places the male candidate is going to get chosen over the female candidate,” she says. “Because the boards [of directors] are more comfortable with that, there’s a history there. They’re seen as more credible on some level. I think that’s all still true.”
It sounds like the way of the world, not just the ballet world, where women are underrepresented at the top reaches of organizations. Women founded these companies, and when the groups became established and no longer danced on wobbly legs, their boards of directors put men in charge, which may be simple sexism. But there’s more to the picture, and it begins with the inescapable fact that girls in ballet schools outnumber boys by at least 10 or 20 to one.
Moore describes the outcome of this imbalance: “The culture of how boys and girls are trained, and how men and women are treated in professional ballet companies is very different. The girls are trained to be ‘good girls,’ obedient and silent and to stand in a line and look all the same. And that’s not true with the corps de ballet for men or for the boys in the schools. They are encouraged to be much more individuals, to do solos, to stand out more than the girls.”
Read the full article here.
