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, June 1st: Miami DanceMakers
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.
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
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?
Over 80% of Ballets Are Still Choreographed By Men
By Lauren Wingenwroth
25 July 2019
In the past several years, ballet has been called out timeandagain for not fostering, presenting and commissioning the work of women. Recently, highlighting women ballet choreographers has become somewhatofatrend, with companies pioneering initiatives to try to close the gender gap, or presenting all-women programs.
But numbers don’t lie, and unfortunately, we still haven’t made much progress.
A new report released by the Dance Data Project—a nonprofit launched earlier this yearto assess gender inequity in ballet—looks at the 2018-2019 seasons of America’s 50 largest balletcompanies (this list is determined by budget, and “ballet” is defined loosely: The list includes companies like Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and L.A. Dance Project).Here are the biggest takeaways:
81 percent of works last season were choreographed by men.
That’s 520 of the total 645 works performed by these companies last season. Looking at just full-length ballets the number grows worse: 88 percent were choreographed by men.
One bright spot: Only 65 percent of world premieres were choreographed by men—but of full-length world premieres, 90 percent were by men. Men choreographed 70 percent of mainstage world premieres, although women did have more opportunities in non-mainstage world premieres, which were split 55 percent men and 45 percent women.
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Missing the pointe:The Dance Data Project looked at the 2018–2019 seasons of the 50 largest ballet companies in the US. Turns out that 81% of ballets produced last season were choreographed by men. OK then.
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“The endgame is clear: Bank of America wants the women out of power at Alex and Ani.” That’s from a $1.2 billion lawsuit by the women-led company, which is also claiming that Bank of America’s actions “have sent a once-thriving American success story into a death spiral.”
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.pngdancedata2019-07-30 11:35:252019-07-30 11:35:26Ellevest What The Elle Newsletter Mentions DDP
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).
“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.”
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“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.
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