By David Lyman

18 June 2019

DDP correction: The article states below, “Among the nation’s top 50 ballet companies, only 13 of the most prestigious full-length works are by women. Of those 13, two were commissioned by Cincinnati Ballet.” The correct number of full-length ballets by women announced for the upcoming season as of May 19, 2019 (as stated in DDP’s report) is 11; two of these ballets are indeed announced for Cincinnati Ballet’s season (one being a second company work).

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“The numbers are shocking,” says Elizabeth Yntema, founder and president of the Chicago-based Dance Data Project.

She’s talking about the lack of female choreographers in America’s ballet companies.

“We’ve been talking about this for years,” says Yntema, “but almost nothing has changed.”

Consider these numbers, which Yntema shared in a pair of presentations at the recent annual conference of Dance/USA, the national service organization for professional dance. Analyzing statistics from the nation’s top 50 ballet companies, she found that:

• 81 percent of all ballets scheduled for the 2019-2020 season are created by men. (The number is even higher – 85 percent – for full-length ballets.)
• 64 percent of all ballet programs during the 2019-2020 season feature only male choreographers.
• Just 12 of the nation’s top 50 ballet companies have female artistic directors.

One of the rare exceptions to all of this, she points out, is Cincinnati Ballet, where artistic director Victoria Morgan has championed the works of female choreographers for more than a decade.

According to the DDP report:

• 56 percent of the works Cincinnati Ballet commissioned for the 2019-2020 season are created by women.
• Female choreographers will be featured in 71 percent of Cincinnati Ballet’s programs.
• Among the nation’s top 50 ballet companies, only 13 of the most prestigious full-length works are by women. Of those 13, two were commissioned by Cincinnati Ballet.

Cincinnati Ballet isn’t completely alone. Yntema’s study noted a handful of other companies, most notably Sacramento Ballet – led by Cincinnatian Amy Seiwert – and Philadelphia’s Ballet X.

“But for the most part, you’re seeing very little progress from the largest companies,” she says. “What makes all this worse is that critics from the largest publications almost never see these other companies. Traditional journalism has been cut, so there is this massive disconnect between the biggest cities and the work that is being done in the rest of the country, particularly the ones being led by women. Often, they don’t get reviewed, so they’re invisible to the rest of the world.”

Read the full article in the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Sunday Breakfast: Elizabeth “Liza” …

By Donald Liebenson 

9 May 2019

“I have a wonderful story about a dead body in an ice house.”

How’s that for an icebreaker? Elizabeth “Liza” Yntema of Winnetka has several such compelling stories to share, but they are not Gillian Flynn-esque forays into the macabre. They are family anecdotes and meant to illustrate how she, along with her husband, Mark Ferguson, became among the most effective of Chicago area philanthropists. It’s not about how much they have raised and donated, which is considerable, but the ways they have strategically directed that money to affect actual change.

Turns out Yntema comes from a long line of inspirational “kick ass women,” like her “grammy,” who lived to be 104 and at the age of 80, tied herself to the Illinois State House in support of the Equal Rights Amendment. It was these women who inspired her to resolve, upon her 40th birthday, to try one new thing a year that scared her or required a new skill—rowing, tap dancing, or climbing a mountain.

“I don’t learn that fast,” Yntema shares with a laugh, “so now it’s about every two or three years that I try a new adventure. Last year when I turned 60, I walked the Camino de Santiago. If I try really hard, I can rise to slightly above mediocre, but I have a lot of fun. I’m really enthusiastic about a lot of things.”

Paramount among those things is philanthropy, especially in the area of arts, youth services, and promoting gender equality. Yntema and Ferguson have marshalled their efforts on behalf of such institutions as the Hubbard Street Dance Company, the Lyric Opera, and the Chicago Jazz Phil- harmonic, as well as Youth Guidance and the Springboard Foundation, which funds non-profit grassroots organizations that focus primarily on after school and supplemental education programs. In 2013, the couple created a program at Holy Trinity High School to fund college visits for students in need. That program has expanded to a national initiative.

Her latest endeavor is her most ambitious yet, the Dance Data ProjectTM (DDP), which received its nonprofit 501(c)(3) status earlier this year. The DDP addresses long institutionalized leadership gender imbalance in ballet in America and abroad. Yntema, a Boston native, danced between the ages of 3 and 13. An avid ballet-goer, she began to notice that the primarily female audience and supporters of ballet were not being represented onstage or off. Consider, she says, Chicago theater—which is nationally renowned for the gender and ethnic diversity of the leadership guiding the companies—artisans shaping the productions and playwrights telling a wider range of stories, not to mention the casts bringing those stories to life. This was not the case in the ballet world, Yntema found.

“Season after season, production after production, the choreography was being done by mostly white men,” she says. “I would ask about it and the response was that women were not really interested in choreography or that there were no good women choreographers. That didn’t sound right, so I started doing research at my kitchen table.” Turns out she was onto some- thing.

Read the whole profile in the Daily North Shore.