New York Times: In Her Words: Melinda Gates
By Francesca Donner
23 August 2020
April 1st: Palm Desert Choreography Festival, April 1st: UNCSA Choreographic Institute Residency, April 30th: South Arts: Professional Development & Artistic Planning Grants, April 30th: South Arts: Express Grants, May 6th: Doris Duke Foundation Grant, May 7th: South Arts Individual Artist Career Opportunity Grant, May 27th: Dancemakers Residency, June 1st: Miami DanceMakers
×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.
By Francesca Donner
23 August 2020
By Shaté L. Hayes
25 August 2020
Black squares on your organization’s social media profile. Posting videos and images of the Black dancers within your company or school. Buttoned up, PR-approved statements that fall in line with what everyone else is saying and doing. Many Black dancers have had enough of performative solidarity from ballet organizations, stemming from the uprisings over the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others. It feels trendy, and it’s not landing.
“I see some companies grappling with it, and I see others patching things, wordsmithing a statement, or negotiating how much responsibility they want to take,” says Theresa Ruth Howard, founder of Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet who’s also an educator, writer, consultant to The Equity Project and seasoned diversity strategist. “When it’s about checking boxes, it’s clear it’s performative.”
Where some organizations are missing the mark is in the misalignment between what they’re posting outwardly and what their dancers of color are experiencing behind closed doors. When a ballet organization’s culture doesn’t feel “Black- or brown-friendly,” as Howard frames it, then any statement promoting racial justice won’t resonate with those who experience something different day to day.
Black dancers are still experiencing various forms of racism in ballet. Sometimes it’s clear macroaggressions, not unlike voter suppression or redlining, where certain groups are kept from equal opportunities. This was the case with Alexis Carter-Black, who says she was told by an instructor at her daughter Ainsley’s ballet school that they didn’t think students should get private lessons and later witnessed that same instructor giving a private lesson to a white dancer. “It seemed like they’d do anything to keep her from progressing,” says Carter-Black.
Other times racism comes in the form of microaggressions—very subtle discriminatory language or behavior that’s harder to prove but still stings nonetheless. For a Black Brazilian dancer, it’s being asked if you can speak English. For the Black dance mom, it’s being called “aggressive” when you ask an instructor about how she handled a conversation with your daughter about her hair. For choreographer Ja’ Malik, who danced with numerous ballet companies and is director and founder of Ballet Boy Productions, it’s being asked if you have a background in African or hip hop when your materials clearly indicate otherwise.
Read the full article here.
24 August 2020
The sheriff at Oban Sheriff Court has approved the appointment of a provisional liquidator to Ballet West Ltd as the business was “no longer financially viable”, a statement from the board of trustees has revealed.
The move formally starts the process of winding up Ballet West Ltd, which will mean the closure of the school at Taynuilt, Argyll, the trustees said
The announcement came five days after formal Police Scotland probe was announced after they received “a number of reports” in connection with claims of sexual impropriety at Ballet West Scotland in Argyll.
On Tuesday, Police Scotland had said there was no police investigation because there no complaints or reports had been made, six days after allegations of sexual impropriety surfaced which led to the resignation of the Ballet West Scotland’s vice principal Jonathan Barton and the suspension of its principal, his mother Gillian Barton.
An ITV investigation heard last week from more than 60 women – former students, staff and parents – who have made allegations of Mr Barton’s inappropriate behaviour going back as far as 2004 and as recently as 2018. The allegations include sexual contact with his students.
It is alleged that as further 30 have spoken out about alleged misconduct.
Mr Barton, a 38-year-old award winning dancer and teacher quit after being accused of abusing his position to sleep with teenage pupils at the £9,000 a year boarding school his family runs.
The latest governors’ statement said: “Due to events over the last two weeks, Ballet West Ltd, a registered Scottish charity, has been driven to the point of insolvency and the trustees had a legal duty to inform the charity regulator and take appropriate action in these circumstances.
Read the full article here.
By Gary Craig
21 August 2020
Once a teenager at the renowned School of American Ballet, Aesha Ash knows how moving and significant it would have been to have a teacher who looked like herself.
Now she will be that teacher.
“For Black women and people of color, to feel they belong in these institutions we have to see ourselves,” Ash said this week.
Ash, a 42-year-old Rochester native, has long been a trailblazer, knocking down racial walls in the largely white world of professional ballet.
She once was the sole Black female ballerina with the New York City Ballet, and, now, she has been chosen as the first Black female full-time instructor at the School of American Ballet, or SAB, in New York City. Teenagers and younger dancers study and train at SAB, an associate school of the New York City Ballet.
In a recent article, The New York Times highlighted Ash’s appointment with a headline that in part stated: “This former City Ballet dancer becomes the first Black female member of the School of American Ballet’s permanent faculty. Yes, it’s a big deal.”
Such a big deal that Ash, her husband, and their two young children — a 10-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son — decided to move from the California neighborhood they love to Manhattan for her to take on the faculty job.
“The reason why we made the decision is because this position goes so much bigger than just a ballet teacher at a prestigious school,” Ash said in a telephone interview this week from her new Manhattan home. “The historic meaning of this position was just something we could not look away from. It was my husband who was telling me, ‘Aesha, this is something you stand for. This has been your work from the very beginning.’ ”
Read the full article here.
By Elaine Quijano
17 August 2020
New York — After 86 years, New York City’s famed School of American Ballet is making history not on the stage, but in the classroom, when Aesha Ash becomes the school’s first Black female permanent faculty member.
Ash hopes to make a difference for her students.
“I feel that I have this hyper-awareness now of that dancer who’s struggling … and sort of see that sort of self-doubt creeping in,” she explained.
As a teenager, she had those self-doubts in a school with a mostly-White student population.
“When you look at performances, when you look at footage, when you see images on the wall … are everything but your own, that is saying something to the dancers around,” Ash said.
But she persevered, earning a spot with the New York City Ballet — one of only a few dancers of color.
Read the full article here.
On August 18th, 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified— that’s 100 years ago, today.
The passage of the Amendment was one of the first tangible steps on the long road to equity, a road which continues to extend before us, even today in 2020, and which sees women of color and other minorities marginalized to an even greater degree. As we arrive at this milestone of 100 years since women suffragists secured the right to vote, let us celebrate how far women have come but take note of the countless areas in which inequity prevails (and worsens due to the pandemic).
By Christina Rexrode and Lauren Weber
15 August 2020
Working parents going on six months without school or camp are about to take another hit: rising child-care costs.
Parents with school-age children are hiring sitters or paying for online classes they wouldn’t need if their children were in school. Some are lining up tutors or switching to private schools that plan to open for in-person learning. Parents with younger children are bracing for potentially higher charges at their day cares, which are straining to pay for protective gear and additional cleaning.
Child care and its costs might seem incidental in a global pandemic, but they are integral to the economy. For individual families, higher child-care expenses can range from troublesome to financially debilitating. Rising costs divert money from other purchases or investments, and many working parents said child-care costs prevent them from saving for a home. Yet without child care, parents are less productive at work—not to mention more stressed and tired.
“Here’s the deal,” said Misty Heggeness, an economist who wrote about the pandemic’s effect on working mothers for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. “If you care about U.S. economic growth…this should be one of the first areas of concern for you.”
Read the full article here.
By Nora Caplan-Bricker
10 August 2020
Women make up nearly nine in ten nurses, more than eight in ten home health aides, and more than two-thirds of grocery-store cashiers. In other words, they perform the lion’s share of the vital care that we now call “essential” work. At the same time, since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, women have been laid off at an outsized rate (a reflection of their concentration within the country’s lowest-compensated, least-secure jobs) and have been forced to reduce their paid hours to look after children at nearly twice the rate of their male partners. As the kinds of labor that sustain life have grown deadlier, women have taken on more of the risk. As paid work and the time to perform it become scarcer resources, men are retaining the better part of both.
What conclusions can we draw from the gendered dimensions of the current crisis? Kate Manne’s “Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women” presents a paradigm that maps neatly onto life in lockdown. Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell, argues that women “are expected to give traditionally feminine goods”—including physical and emotional care—and “to refrain from taking traditionally masculine goods,” such as power and authority. These assumptions result in a society in which men “are tacitly deemed entitled” to much of what life has to offer, while women are perpetual debtors, their very humanity “owed to others.”
Once again, Manne’s work is speaking to a moment that she could not have foreseen. Her first book, “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny,” was released into the gathering storm of the #MeToo movement, in November, 2017. It was uncanny timing, and the intuitive explanatory power of Manne’s argument attracted a broad, enthusiastic following to a demanding academic work. Manne proposed that misogyny “should be understood as the ‘law enforcement’ branch of a patriarchal order,” a system of punishment that swings into action whenever women violate the rules. Sexism, by contrast, is the set of ideas that justifies the power which men hold. “Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts,” Manne writes in “Down Girl.” “Sexism has a theory; misogyny wields a cudgel.”
In “Entitled,” Manne turns her attention to the gendered economy that these forces defend. If sexism is a scientist and misogyny is a cop, then the system of entitlements is a suite of financiers forever seeking ways to profit off someone else’s debt. Manne applies her theory to a litany of lopsided situations, sorting them into one of three scenarios: first, how women can be punished for failing to provide sex, love, admiration, or anything else that the dominant sex considers its due (Manne points to mass murders perpetrated by incels, who kill in protest of perceived rejection); second, how women struggle to lay claim to masculine-coded powers and privileges, the Presidency being one prominent example; and, third, how women may be denied the feminine-coded forms of care—such as attention to their pain—that they are expected to supply, not demand.
Manne first posited this slanted system of goods and services in “Down Girl,” and her arguments in “Entitled,” her first book for a general audience, may at times feel overly familiar to readers already acquainted with her work. In some cases, the new book remedies the other’s omissions, especially by considering transmisogyny and misogynoir, the interlocking systems of oppression that affect trans and Black women, respectively. Manne illustrates her ideas with recent headlines and cultural touchstones, travelling smoothly from the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to the sentencing of Brock Turner, from the movie “Gaslight” to the short story “Cat Person.” Manne examines these stories in order to reveal what male entitlement costs women and non-binary people, and how we might begin to resist its demands, even as the invisible matrix of male power shapes every imaginable interaction.
Read the full article online here.
By Emily Davenport
11 August 2020
Dancer and activist Ingrid Silva is taking on women’s issues and empowering women in the process through her New York City-based organization.
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Silva started her dance journey at the age of 8 and began training in ballet at Dançando Para Não Dançar, a social project in Mangueira.
“Dance was never actually my dream but I was really excited when my mom mentioned to me about dance auditions,” said Silva. “I’ve always been involved with sports, been swimming since age 3, and joined a professional team. I had to decide between swimming and classical ballet – I ended up choosing ballet because it was really challenging and super fun.”
Silva went on to dance for three more schools in Brazil — Escola de Dança Maria Olenewa, Centro de Movimento Debora Colker and Grupo Corpo — before she sent an audition tape to the Dance Theatre of Harlem. She officially joined the company in January 2008, and currently resides in Riverside.
“It was a really interesting and amazing experience because when I first came to the states, I literally came for dancing,” said Silva. “My teacher came with me for the first month and then after that, I stayed with the school. That’s when my journey started in the states.”
During her time in the United States, Silva not only gained principal roles in a number of performances, but she also gained national recognition for leading the charge for skin-toned ballet shoes for dancers of all races and cultures. Silva has also been seen as a spokesperson for Activia and appearing in a Nike video series called The Common Thread.
Three years ago, Silva founded EmpowHER NY, an organization that centers around educating and giving women a safe space to speak freely about their ideas and experiences. The organization has made global connections with brands and organizations that want to empower women. Silva says that the organization has had events in New York prior to the pandemic, and has also helped women launch their brands and help them find jobs.
Read the full article here.
Read Parts 1-3 of the Playbook here.