By Steve Sucato
21 January 2020
It’s fitting that New Zealand, the first country to give women the right to vote, should also be the place where, for the first time, a major ballet company will present an entire 12-month dance season devoted to works by female choreographers. But according to Royal New Zealand Ballet’s artistic director, former Pacific Northwest Ballet star Patricia Barker, programming this historic season was far less difficult than it might sound.
At the start of your tenure in 2017, there was some controversy around the ratio of non–New Zealander dancers and staff hired. Has the dust finally settled?
That really never had anything to do with me. I was just the unlucky one that stepped into it. My goal was to turn the attention back to the art. As soon as we did that, all of that uproar dissipated.
Read the full article from Dance Magazine.
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