Upcoming Deadlines

October 18th: Spotlight Awards Program, October 31st: Genesis 2022 Choreographic Competition, November 1st: ArtFields 2022, December 1st: New York City Dance Rehearsal Space Subsidy Program

×

News

"The Devil Ties My Tongue" by Amy Seiwert performed for the SKETCH Series, 2013. Photo by David DeSilva. Courtesy of Amy Seiwert's Imagery

DDP Announces Global Conversations Round 5: Behind the Stage & Partnership with Auditorium Theatre

/0 Comments/in /by

June 24, 2021 | Northfield, IL | Dance Data Project® (DDP) today announces the upcoming release of Global Conversations: Behind the Stage, the fifth round in a series of virtual interviews. Round 5 will highlight those professionals who work behind the scenes and out of sight, creating artistic magic in every production, while coping with disasters on a regular basis. This Round features 11 conversations with a roster of renowned women in their respective fields, from stage managers and lighting designers to fight choreographers and filmmakers.
For the first time, DDP presents Global Conversations in partnership with the Auditorium Theatre. The Auditorium’s commitment to lifting up diverse voices in the arts has been sustained over its 130-year history, celebrating performances by Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Ballet Hispánico, and Ballet Folklórico de México, among others.
“Dance Data Project® is delighted to be working with the historic Auditorium Theatre as co-presenter for Round 5 of Global Conversations: Behind the Stage,” commented DDP Founder and President Elizabeth “Liza” Yntema. “On the cusp of their re-opening, it’s critical to be thinking about the role that women artists and artisans play in the $61 billion performing arts economy. The Auditorium Theatre, one of the greatest stages in the U.S., has always been at the forefront of innovative productions, so this true partnership is a great fit.”
Rich Regan, Chief Executive Officer of the Auditorium Theatre and a live-performance professional himself, sat down with Yntema to discuss Behind the Stage and each organization’s commitment to an equitable arts future. He noted, “Emerging from these difficult months, the performing arts community must come together to address inequity in all forms and forge a sustainable future post-pandemic. The innovative work performed by Dance Data Project® provides a necessary perspective on classically based dance and presents it in an accessible way. Behind the Stage will become yet another resource for dancers and arts professionals to learn from, aligning well with the Auditorium’s mission to be ‘The Theatre for the People.’”
In Round 5, Yntema will lead conversations covering each artist’s career path, ability to cope with glitches large and small, and the role the pandemic has had in shaping their respective fields. The roster of participants includes the following list of leaders in producing and creatively constructing some of the world’s best dance and theatre performances.
Week 1:
●     June 28, 2021: Dacquiri Baptiste
●     June 29, 2021: Caryn Wells & Eleanor Wolfe
●     June 30, 2021: Nicole Pearce & Nicole Walters
●     July 1, 2021: Bregje Van Balen & Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew
●     July 2, 2021: Jacqueline Reid & Kristin Colvin Young
Week 2:
●     July 5, 2021: Fiona Findlater & Laura Oliver
●     July 6, 2021: Jo Chalhoub
●     July 7, 2021: Sharon Huizinga & Kelly Palmer
●     July 8, 2021: Bess Kargman & Talia Koylass
●     July 9, 2021: Lindsay Gauthier
●     July 9, 2021 (Capstone): Jennifer Tipton
Global Conversations: Behind the Stage will premiere the week of June 28, 2021 and continue through July 9, 2021. Episodes will be released every weekday at 12:00 PM/noon EDT on Instagram TV (IGTV), YouTube, and the DDP website.
About Dance Data Project®
Founded in 2015 as a simple database and launched officially in 2019 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Dance Data Project®’s mission is to inform equity in classical dance through data analysis, advocacy, and programming. Learn more at dancedataproject.com.
About The Auditorium Theatre
The Auditorium Theatre, located at 50 E Ida B Wells Dr at Roosevelt University in Chicago, is an Illinois not-for-profit organization committed to presenting the finest in international, cultural, community, and educational programming to all of Chicago and beyond as The Theatre for the People. The organization also is committed to the continued restoration and preservation of this National Historic Landmark. For more information visit AuditoriumTheatre.org.

DDP Finds Massive Funding Gap Between Contemporary Dance V. Ballet in the U.S. but Determines Leadership of Contemporary Dance Companies is Much More Gender Equitable

/0 Comments/in , /by

Dance Data Project® (DDP) today released its third annual Artistic & Executive Leadership Report, doubling the scope of ballet companies surveyed to 100 and, for the first time, including compensation analysis for associate artistic directors and other highly paid individuals, in addition to previously surveyed artistic and executive directors.

Read more

Pointe Magazine – Facing an Employment Gap? Whether by Choice or Circumstance, Here are Tips for Managing

/0 Comments/in /by
Read more

The Washington Post: ‘The pay is absolute crap’: Child-care workers are quitting rapidly, a red flag for the economy

/0 Comments/in /by
Read more

WBUR News: Where are the Women in Ballet?

/0 Comments/in , /by

18 September 2015

By Sharon Basco

When the Boston Ballet Company was founded 52 years ago, ballet was a matriarchy, and George Balanchine’s familiar quote “ballet is woman” made sense.

Boston’s was one of eight ballet companies started in cities across the U.S. — including Philadelphia, Houston and Washington D.C. — that were launched with a $7.7 million Ford Foundation grant in 1963. Created and nurtured by strong female artistic directors, these companies grew in size and stature, and all are thriving today. But the women leaders are gone; all of these troupes are headed by men. And the choreography is, with perhaps one exception per season, by men.

E. Virginia Williams with company in 1977. (Courtesy Boston Ballet)
E. Virginia Williams with company in 1977. (Courtesy Boston Ballet)

“I was staggered by the numbers,” said Boston Ballet’s artistic director Mikko Nissinen. “I’ve heard these numbers before — that there are so many fewer female choreographers — and I don’t have any answer to that, but it’s very interesting.”

Nissinen seems to have a better handle on why it was women who founded the ballet companies: “Those companies were born from the good regional ballet schools,” he said. That was the case with the Boston Ballet and its founding director, E. Virginia Williams. Energetic, indomitable and witty, she was quick with a riposte when told “Virginia, your dancers love you.” “They darn well better!” she’d reply.

Williams was just one of the determined women, all ballet school directors, who started companies with the Ford grant. “At that point these really good ballet schools were all run by women,” Nissinen continued, referring to Barbara Weisberger in Philadelphia, Mary Day in Washington, D.C. and Nina Popova in Houston. “Women who then naturally became the directors of the companies in the pioneering era. Right now it happens actually that lots of these companies are run by men.”

Academics recognize the absence of women in top artistic positions, as well as the absence of female choreographers chosen by ballet companies. Dance writers do, too, though they rarely write about it. One exception is Luke Jennings, who took on Britain’s ballet record in The Observer a few years ago:

“It’s 14 years since a woman was commissioned to create a main-stage ballet at the Royal Opera House. If this were true of women playwrights at the National Theatre, or female artists at the Tate, there would be outrage. But at the flagship institution of British dance, the omission has escaped public notice. As it did last summer when the Royal Ballet and the National Gallery launched a collaboration named “Metamorphosis: Titian 2012.” Of the 15 artists and choreographers involved, none was a woman. An ironic decision, given that the subject was the goddess Diana, the personification of feminine power.”

Renown choreographer Twyla Tharp throws her hand up at the curtain call for the opening night of Broadway's "Come Fly Away" in 2010. (Charles Sykes/AP)
Renown choreographer Twyla Tharp throws her hand up at the curtain call for the opening night of Broadway’s “Come Fly Away” in 2010. (Charles Sykes/AP)

An icon of woman-power in choreography has, for the past 50 years, been Twyla Tharp. She has just begun a self-organized U.S. tour to celebrate the half-century mark since she, at age 23, started her own modern dance troupe. When she visited Boston earlier this year, I mentioned the absence of female choreographers on ballet company’s schedules, and she laughed.

“Really? Have you noticed?” Tharp said. “And how many famous painters, philosophers, musicians, some writers — it’s not a woman’s prerogative to be an artist. We all know women have a high hill to climb whatever they do, and the world of arts is very chauvinistic, and one knows that going in.”

It’s not just in the U.S. that men lead and choreograph the ballet troupes. “The world class companies, for the most part, are run by men,” said Lynn Garafola, a writer, scholar and founder of the Columbia University seminar Studies in Dance. And why are women leaders gone? “The more professional a company becomes, in my observation, the more likely women are going to disappear from the leadership positions, and they’re going to be replaced by men. I think this is very typical of organizations when they get larger, when they get more important.”

Rachel Moore in 2010. (Javier Galeano/AP)
Rachel Moore in 2010. (Javier Galeano/AP)

One of the few women in powerful positions — although on the business side, not where the artistic decisions are made — Rachel Moore leaves her CEO job at American Ballet Theatre on Oct. 5 to become president and CEO of the Los Angeles Music Center. Like everyone quoted in this story, Moore is a former professional dancer, so she speaks from her own experience.

“The men are able to get the more stable, the more solid jobs. For a variety of reasons. I think that it’s still a man’s world and for many places the male candidate is going to get chosen over the female candidate,” she says. “Because the boards [of directors] are more comfortable with that, there’s a history there. They’re seen as more credible on some level. I think that’s all still true.”

It sounds like the way of the world, not just the ballet world, where women are underrepresented at the top reaches of organizations. Women founded these companies, and when the groups became established and no longer danced on wobbly legs, their boards of directors put men in charge, which may be simple sexism. But there’s more to the picture, and it begins with the inescapable fact that girls in ballet schools outnumber boys by at least 10 or 20 to one.

Moore describes the outcome of this imbalance: “The culture of how boys and girls are trained, and how men and women are treated in professional ballet companies is very different. The girls are trained to be ‘good girls,’ obedient and silent and to stand in a line and look all the same. And that’s not true with the corps de ballet for men or for the boys in the schools. They are encouraged to be much more individuals, to do solos, to stand out more than the girls.”

 

Read the full article here.

DDP’s 2020-2021 Season Overview Finds Men Choreograph 69 Percent of all Works Programmed by Largest 50 U.S. Ballet Companies – Some Progress Noted in a Pandemic Restricted Year

/0 Comments/in , /by

Dance Data Project® (DDP) today released its third annual Artistic & Executive Leadership Report, doubling the scope of ballet companies surveyed to 100 and, for the first time, including compensation analysis for associate artistic directors and other highly paid individuals, in addition to previously surveyed artistic and executive directors.

Read more

Behind the Stage – Dance Data Project® Releases New Resource, The “Stage Manager’s Checklist”

/0 Comments/in , /by

Dance Data Project® (DDP) today released its third annual Artistic & Executive Leadership Report, doubling the scope of ballet companies surveyed to 100 and, for the first time, including compensation analysis for associate artistic directors and other highly paid individuals, in addition to previously surveyed artistic and executive directors.

Read more

The 19th: Moms spent the equivalent of a full-time job on child care last year — while working at the same time

/0 Comments/in /by
Read more