May 6th: Doris Duke Foundation Grant, May 7th: South Arts Individual Artist Career Opportunity Grant, May 27th: Dancemakers Residency, June 1st: Miami DanceMakers
"The Devil Ties My Tongue" by Amy Seiwert performed for the SKETCH Series, 2013. Photo by David DeSilva. Courtesy of Amy Seiwert's Imagery
DDP will cover stories from the corporate, for profit world regarding issues surrounding pay equity and transparency where relevant, such as other industries with low representation of women: tech, the sciences, venture capital, the entertainment industry, etc. to examine parallels between these male dominated spheres where informal hiring and word of mouth is the norm.
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.
https://ddp-wordpress.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/13142553/Asset-6-1.png10711500dancedatahttps://www.dancedataproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/DDP_logo_Primary.pngdancedata2019-09-13 07:32:552019-11-25 14:43:52DDP Gets a Feature on Forbes.com – The Gender Pay Gap Exists in Ballet, Too
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
This is the second entry to my diary, and as my week in residency at the Sydney Opera House as part of the Emerging Female Classical Choreographer Initiative has come to a close, I am looking back on this incredible week reflecting and absorbing all the new information, people and experiences. I was given advice that I cannot wait to put into action starting out in my career, and as a young choreographer.
Walking up to the incredible Sydney Opera House on the first day and every day after that, I was feeling very special and thinking about all the great artists and people who have walked into the same house. Once I arrived at the stage door on the first day, I was introduced to Rehearsal Room 77. A beautiful, cosy studio which I would call my creative space for the week. I was able to focus solely on being a choreographer and putting myself into that mindset, which time hasn’t allowed in the past because of being a dancer taking my main focus during my 5 professional years.
I was able to work with 4 pre-professional dancers and 1 understudy who are all students of Tanya Pearson Coaching Academy. It was interesting for me to work with students and have the freedom to give them my ideas and I admire how much they threw themselves into my piece. It was also a challenge for me to be able to communicate and adapt my ideas in a way which their bodies understood.
As director of the World Choreography Institute, I am often asked if choreography can be taught. My answer is an emphatic “maybe.”
Nature versus nurture in choreography presents the argument: Can creativity be taught, or is it a gift? The jury is out, with research and vociferous opinions coming down on both sides. I tend to come down on the side of “it’s a gift,” and that inspired artistic creation cannot be taught. Structural technique, and methods of analysis, rehearsal, and experimentation can — and should be — taught. Especially in choreography.
Why especially? Because it’s not done. Not enough, anyway. The reasons for this are multifaceted, complex, and exist as much by habit as by economics and logistics. The lack of choreographic training exists in all dance genres, each with its own particular issues, but all tending to put choreographers in the position of producing too many works in too little time.
Creating choreography poses more problems than making new work in any other art form. Painters need canvas, paints, and brushes. Playwrights need paper and pen, or the contemporary equivalent. Composers need knowledge of notation, an instrument, or the ability to hear music in their head. They can work alone. Choreographers need bodies and space. Space is expensive, and dancers should be. And that’s prohibitive, often causing choreographers to premiere works before they are fully cooked.
https://ddp-wordpress.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/13141955/DDP_logo_Primary.png26524000dancedatahttps://www.dancedataproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/DDP_logo_Primary.pngdancedata2019-09-05 13:27:512019-09-05 13:27:54My Times: Arts Beat: Teaching choreography can be a conundrum
The Illinois Department of Labor is gearing up to help business owners with the new ‘no salary history’ law, which takes effect Sept. 29. The measure prohibits employers from asking applicants what they made in a previous job.
Under the measure, asking about salary history as a way to determine pay could result in a fine.
Michael Kleinik, director of the Illinois Department of Labor, said he’s taking the necessary steps to educate employers and help them avoid those penalties.
“Most companies would have to redo their application process. Probably most applications ask what the past salary is, so they have to get away from that.”
In case of a violation, the Illinois Department of Labor would investigate.
Kleinik said there is additional information on their website. A hotline is available at 312-793-6797 to help answer questions. Kleinek said he’s also working on preparing workshops and other outreach events across the state.
https://ddp-wordpress.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/13142018/Asset-2.png296600dancedatahttps://www.dancedataproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/DDP_logo_Primary.pngdancedata2019-09-03 09:04:372019-09-03 09:04:39NPR Illinois: IL Department Of Labor Prepares For ‘No Salary History’ Rollout
Days after “Good Morning America” host Lara Spencer apologized for “insensitive” comments mocking Prince George for taking a ballet class, Cincinnati Ballet is working to support male dancers.
The controversy began last week when Spencer brought up Prince George’s back-to-school plans in a clip published Thursday.
“In addition to the usual first or second-grade things like math, science and history, the future king of England will be putting down the Play-Doh to take on religious studies, computer programming, poetry and ballet, among other things,” Spencer said.
The clip then cuts to images of the 6-year-old, but laughter can be heard from the “GMA” set.
“Prince William says George absolutely loves ballet. I have news for you, Prince William: We’ll see how long that lasts,” Spencer added with a chuckle.
A bipartisan group of legislators reintroducedThe Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA) last Tuesday, with the aim of closing the gap between existing protections for pregnant workers and discrimination that still persists against them. The bill was first introduced in 2012 by Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) but failed when opponents claimed that it would create an undue burden for companies. Now, the legislators hope for a different outcome.
“No woman should be forced out of a job or denied employment opportunities simply because she is pregnant,” said Representative Lucy McBath (D-GA), one of the sponsors of the bill.
If passed, the PWFA would close existing gaps in workplace protections for pregnant employees by obligating employers to make minor changes to support them – for example permitting someone an extra bathroom break during a shift, or a chair to sit on. Modeled after the Americans with Disabilities Act, the PWFA states that providing reasonable accommodation is the affirmative duty of an employer unless doing so would pose an undue hardship to his or her business. In addition, the legislation prohibits employers from discriminating against people on the basis of their need for reasonable accommodations related to childbirth or pregnancy.
At the moment, only 25 American states have accommodations laws in place to protect pregnant women, which means that individuals in 50 percent of this country can only rely on federal statutes to guard against workplace discrimination. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA), passed in 1974, provides some safeguards, as did a 2015 Supreme Court decision that outlined when and how the PDA should protect accommodations.
Read the full article on Women’s Media Center’s news page.
https://ddp-wordpress.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/13142018/Asset-2.png296600dancedatahttps://www.dancedataproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/DDP_logo_Primary.pngdancedata2019-08-29 14:58:482019-08-29 14:58:49Women’s Media Center: Legislators introduce The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act
Whether familiar with the dance world or not, it probably won’t come as a surprise to most readers that the majority of the dance industry work-force is female. In fact, according to Data USA12, as much as eighty-five percent of the workers in the dance industry are women. However, when examining the past seasons of some of the most important presenting venues in the Northeast region of the United States it becomes clear that gender numbers shift dramatically when looking at successful choreographers.
The numbers:
The gender imbalance in high scale dance companies is not new. In 1976 Wendy Perron and Stephanie Woodard wrote a study called ‘Is there a bias against women in the dance world?’. The article showed clear data by which male choreographers were getting more opportunities and grants, and therefor enjoying more success than their female counterparts. Perron revised her article in 2001 to find that little had changed in nearly thirty years10.
The early 2000’s seem to have been an era of re-awakening to the gender issue in the dance world. This was the time in which several female choreographers including JoAnna Mendl Shaw14, Janis Brenner15, Ellis Wood16 and Heidi Latsky17 formed The Gender Project: a collective that gathered data, participated in panels and created work geared towards changing the face of gender preference in the dance world13.In 2001,Scherr from the New York Times accused the Endowment for the Arts of favoring male choreographers (as for the last five years, the Endowment for the Arts has given balanced grants to male and female choreographers for the production of new work).
https://ddp-wordpress.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/13142018/Asset-2.png296600dancedatahttps://www.dancedataproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/DDP_logo_Primary.pngdancedata2019-08-29 09:02:112019-08-29 09:02:13Choreography and Gender: Still Looking for the Female Choreographers
A lack of female choreographers in dance is not down to simple discrimination but too much self-doubt among qualified women, the director of English National Ballet has suggested.
Tamara Rojo, a ballerina and artistic director, said she had sought female choreographers only for them to turn down opportunities wrongly believing they are not qualified.
Saying she has “never” heard the same doubts from a male choreographer, she admitted even she had hesitated to take senior roles for fear she did not know enough.
Rojo has recently commissioned a triple bill of works by three female choreographers, in a new programme entitled She Said.
In an interview with The Stage, Rojo disclosed she had come up with the idea four years ago, before the issue of women in dance became such a high-profile debate.
“My original motive was simple: I had never done a piece by a female choreographer,” she told the magazine. “In the theatre the dynamic of the piece is always from a male perspective.
It is sometimes suggested that women simply do not think they can
choreograph as men do. One aspect of the problem may be due to training that
does not suggest that this is a plausible path. This is what makes Pacific
Northwest Ballet School’s New Voices:
Choreography and Process for Young Women course so significant. At a time
when girls’ confidence begins to fade in comparison to young boys’, the school
has introduced a class intended to empower them through creativity. Few
programs like PNB’s exist at a ballet school level.
In fact, the majority of choreography courses are implemented at a college
level. This problematic given the tendency for young dancers to skip college
and go straight into the ranks of a company at a young age. Dancers are exposed
to the choreographic process only through the lens of a performer, a tendency
that is detrimental not only to their success as a dancer, but also to their
confidence as they take their next steps in dance, following retirement.
In a time when ballet dancers are embracing new styles and career paths,
their schools need to reflect that diversity and experimental nature.
Whether for a major or minor requirement, most university dance programs encourage dancers to explore all aspects of dance. For dance composition, students learn either through a course in which they produce actual works for the stage or through improvisation courses with no end-game of a performance. This opportunity to “workshop,” as choreographers often put it, is exactly what the dance faculty at Dean College are encouraging, Dance Spiritreports. The faculty even went so far as to assert that these courses should be a requirement in dance programs in order to “make sure your dance degree is going to work for you in the real world.” Dance Spirit suggests this may be due to the dying “choreographer/muse” relationship in a process that now “favors collaboration” or improvisation when prompted by the choreographer. As a dancer graduates and joins a company, he or she should be fully prepared to work closely with a choreographer and understand the choreographic process from the creator’s perspective.
This philosophy is extremely relevant for dancers joining smaller companies, where the hierarchical corps structure of a ballet company is replaced by a collaborative, “everyone does everything” environment. It may be advantageous for larger, more influential companies with the corps-soloist-principal hierarchy to embrace, too. Pacific Northwest Ballet artistic director Peter Boal, for instance, introduced collaboration and inverted the power dynamic of director-student relationships by showing his own new work, a piece he made on the Professional Division men for their School Performance, to students in the PNB school’s New Voices course. Following the showing, the group had a 30-minute critique of the work, which dealt with alienation and the support peers can offer. In this choreographer-to-choreographer discussion, the young women ended up helping Boal both in how to approach his final weeks with his dancers and in how to most clearly communicate his ideas for the work.
Dancers at other ballet schools who inevitably skip college will entirely
miss this key element in dance pedagogy.
Stephen Ursprung, a professor of Dance Studies at Dean College told Dance Spirit, “‘Oftentimes we impose limitations on what the students can or cannot do and this ignites their imaginations. At first it may be scary or overwhelming: Many dancers come from very rigorous technical training and get caught up in whether what they do is ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ In a choreography class, these binaries do not exist.'” If these ideas were incorporated into courses at ballet schools, we could be dealing with a greater pool of young dancers feeling empowered to choreograph, regardless of gender.
https://ddp-wordpress.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/13141404/TacklingtheProb_POSTHeader-e1565900829142.png354850Isabelle Vailhttps://www.dancedataproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/DDP_logo_Primary.pngIsabelle Vail2019-08-16 12:00:162019-08-16 14:10:03Tackling the Problem: Why aren’t women hired as choreographers?