December 6th: 2024 Idea Capital Grant, December 20th: Ajkun Ballet Theatre, December 20th: Emergence Artist Residency, December 31st: Studio Essentials Grant, February 28th: National Dance Project Travel Fund, April 30th: South Arts Individual Artist Career Opportunity Grant, April 30th: South Arts: Professional Development & Artistic Planning Grants, April 30th: South Arts: Express Grants, September 16th: The Awesome Foundation Micro Grants, September 16th: New England States Touring (NEST 1 and 2), September 30th: New England Presenter Travel Fund, September 30th: Amplifi Napa Valley - Emerging Artists Grant, September 30th: Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet Scholarship, September 30th: 24 Seven Dance Convention, September 30th: National Theater Project Presenter Travel Grant, September 30th: Bethany Arts Community Residency
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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
Dance Data Project® welcomes six new team members to its summer 2021 cohort!
Dance Data Project® today announced today released Part 1 of its annual “Largest 50” analysis of United States ballet companies. DDP has also greatly expanded its research scope, surveying a total of 126 U.S. ballet companies,* an increase of 70% from 74 companies surveyed in 2020.
Dance Data Project® today announced the release of two tools that provide ballet and dance schools, as well as students, parents, and instructors with specific measures to help students and professional dancers to recognize and prevent sexual harassed or physical abuse: the first is a checklist of safety measures; the second is a one-stop resource detailing the reporting around and work being done in the US and globally to address sexual abuse and harassment in the dance and allied performance fields, sports and youth-oriented not for profits. In addition, DDP released a “DDP Talks To”… interview with Emma Lister and Zoë Ashe-Brown, who, alongside Lister’s Makeshift Company and MOVERS SHAKERS MAKERS podcast, conducted a wide ranging survey in September 2020 on mental health in ballet.
Dance Data Project® (DDP) today announces the release of Global Conversations: From the Ground Up, the fourth round in a series of virtual interviews. Round 4 re-imagines a more sustainable and equitable system for teaching, marketing, and branding ballet and features 10 conversations with a roster of majority women leaders of national dance and presenting service organizations, as well as artistic and executive directors, dancers, and choreographers.
3 March 2021
By Gia Kourlas
With performances on pause, many dancers are rethinking their relationship to weight.
Lovette also understands that she can help make ballet better. In the past few years, she has started making a name for herself as a choreographer. That puts her in a rare position to affect change.
“This is so why I wanted to be a choreographer,” she said. “The choreographer has even more power than anybody else because we get to choose who’s in the ballet. Most places I go, I can take anyone in the company. Maybe they’ll nudge and say: ‘Oh, no, no, no, you shouldn’t choose her. You should choose her. She’s better.’ But I can go, ‘No. I want her.’ Every time! And it’s so empowering.”
Read the full article here.
Dance Data Project® (DDP) today announces the Data Byte: Global Resident Choreographer Survey 2021, a mini-report focusing on the gender distribution of 64 resident choreographer (RC) positions at 75 United States and 68 international ballet companies for a total of 143 companies.
This February, in observation of African American History Month, DDP is sharing the stories and names of Black and African American women leaders (past and present) in ballet/dance.
By Kate Silzer
13 February 2021
In a powerful 2019 essay in Artforum, Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett made the case that artists who were slated for exhibition in the 2019 Whitney Biennial had a moral obligation to withdraw their work in protest of the then vice chair of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Warren B. Kanders. Kanders had made himself very rich in part through his company, Safariland, which manufactures, among other weapons and police equipment, teargas used by governments to quash civil protests around the world. The authors cite as historical precedent the New York Art Strike Against Racism, War, and Repression, which kicked off in 1970 after Robert Morris closed his own Whitney exhibition in response to “the killing of students at Kent State, the suppression of the Black movement, and Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia.”
In May 1970, groups of activist artists and members of establishment art organizations gathered together in advance of this strike. Among those represented was Women Artists for Revolution or W.A.R., a feminist outgrowth of the Art Workers’ Coalition (A.W.C.), an organization fighting for racial and economic equality within the New York art scene. Cindy Nemser, an art critic and member of W.A.R., reported on the event for The Village Voice, writing that “neither Morris’s brand of moral indignation nor his proposals were strong enough for all those present.” W.A.R., along with the Art Students Coalition, the A.W.C., and Artists and Writers in Protest, voiced “dissatisfaction with what they considered rather mild palliatives.” This article is one of many primary sources compiled in A Documentary HerStory of Women Artists in Revolution, first published in 1971 and reprinted in 2021 by Primary Information.
W.A.R. existed for a brief yet prolific period, from 1969 to 1971. The group ignited a robust movement against gender discrimination within, and widespread exclusion from, New York City’s patriarchal art industry, particularly by galleries and museums who saw art made by women as inherently illegitimate and therefore ineligible for serious consideration. W.A.R. set out to change this.
Read the full article online here.
By Marina Harss
16 February 2021
On January 1, 2021, Uruguayan ballerina María Riccetto officially became the new director of her national ballet company, Ballet Nacional de Sodre. Seldom has the selection of a new leader felt so apt. Riccetto’s career has been a model of hard work, perseverance and attention to craft, rewarded by recognition and responsibility.
Many ballet lovers in New York City remember Riccetto with great fondness. The former American Ballet Theatre soloist, born and raised in Uruguay, had a very particular quality: the ability to transmit a combination of affability and joy, in roles like the young girl in Le Spectre de la Rose, or Twyla Tharp’s Known by Heart, or even as a flower girl in Don Quixote. When she danced, you felt you knew her.
In 2012 she returned to Montevideo, her native city, at the invitation of Julio Bocca, who had just taken the reins at BNS. It was one of the most significant decisions of her career. She became the troupe’s leading ballerina, performing every important role in the repertory. In 2017, she was awarded a Benois de la Danse for her performance of Tatiana in John Cranko’s Onegin.
Along the way, she became a household name in Uruguay, as universally recognized as the country’s soccer champions. Since last year, she has been a fixture on the Uruguayan version of the TV show America’s Got Talent. There is even a line of perfumes named after her. “Floral, with a hint of jasmine,” she told me.
So it makes perfect sense that, after retiring from the stage at the end of 2019 at age 39, she would be tapped for the company’s top job. When I caught up with her in early February, via Zoom, she spoke from her new office, with a photograph taken during one of her performances of Giselle behind her. What follows is an edited version of our conversation, translated from Spanish.
Read the entire article here.
By Emily Dixon
10 February 2021
Shortly after Adriana Pierce joined Miami City Ballet, someone watched her train and made an assessment: “Is Adriana a lesbian? Because she looks like one.” The comment propelled Pierce into exacting self-scrutiny: “I was like, does my dancing look gay? Do I look different? I am different – is that OK?”
Pierce, who left the company after seven seasons to focus on choreography and musical theatre, has rarely felt represented as a queer woman in the ballet world but with her new movement, #QueertheBallet, she hopes to inspire change. Her first project is a pas de deux en pointe choreographed on the American Ballet Theatre dancers Remy Young and Sierra Armstrong, which she is developing during a dance residency at the Bridge Street theatre in Catskill, New York. “I want to show people an authentic, complex relationship between two women through ballet,” Pierce explains. “I want people to see that ballet can be more than a man lifting a woman in a tutu.”
Although queer men are also largely cast in heteronormative partnerships, while facing well-documented homophobic stigma, the crucial difference for Pierce is visibility. “Queer women aren’t even on the radar in our spaces. I sometimes do experience overt homophobia, but the worst of it is the micro-aggression. I’m just never considered,” she says. “The idea that a woman might deviate from the image we expect as a professional ballet dancer is just not even a thought people have.”
Read the full article here.
