Dance Data Project® Welcomes Six New Team Members to its Summer 2021 Cohort
Dance Data Project® welcomes six new team members to its summer 2021 cohort!
Dance Data Project® welcomes six new team members to its summer 2021 cohort!
1 June 2021
By Siobhan Burke
As a teenage ballet student in the 1990s, Katy Pyle had no interest in dating: not boys, not girls, not anyone. A serious love interest — all consuming, really — was already in the picture: ballet.
“I didn’t have space for any other relationships in my life,” Pyle, who uses the pronouns they and them, said in a phone interview from their home in Brooklyn. “It’s silly, but that was my true love.”
Looking back now, at 40 — as a genderqueer lesbian and the founder of the joyful, iconoclastic ballet company Ballez — Pyle can see that relationship more clearly, how it kept them from knowing their full self. Growing up, they knew many openly gay male dancers. But in Pyle’s mind, they said, to be a ballet dancer, gay and a woman “just wasn’t a possibility.”
“I truly was a stranger to myself until I got out of ballet,” said Pyle (who notes that while they are a lesbian and feminist, they don’t fully identify as a woman). “I did not ever know a lesbian in ballet in my training, and it was hard to even find lesbians in the culture at large. There was a real lack of representation, which kept me closeted and confused.”
As Pyle observed from a young age, ballet — a form based in rigidly gendered aesthetic values — is not a world without queer people. But those who are most visible, and have been historically, are gay men. To be a lesbian in ballet, or queer and not a man, is often to feel like the only one, to wonder, in the words of the choreographer Adriana Pierce, who trained at the School of American Ballet: “Has anyone ever done this? Has anyone like me ever walked these halls?”
Ballet upholds narrow ideals for everyone: for men, the archetype of the chivalrous prince; for women, the elusive swan or sylph. Women are expected to look weightless (an image reinforced by the pointe shoe), men more outwardly muscular. Men learn to lift, women to be lifted. In classrooms, strict male and female dress codes often apply.
But within these confines, women typically face greater pressure to conform, in part because there are more of them; competition is steeper. As Pyle puts it: “If Katy Pyle is not living up to the expectations of how to be, there are 20 other young women who want that place.”
Challenging those expectations can be risky and isolating. But more celebrations of difference are emerging. Over the past year, aided by the downtime of the pandemic and the ease of meeting online in the age of Zoom, queer ballet dancers, in particular those socialized as women in their training, have been forging stronger networks and creating work that affirms they’re not alone.
To read the full piece, click here.
DDP Talks To…Sara Clayborne and Emily Hartka, Co-Directors of Charlottesville Ballet
DDP Talks To…Anne Maher, Artistic Director of Ballet Ireland
26 May 2021
By Elaine Sciolino and Alex Marshall
Move over, Mona Lisa. You may be about to have competition as the most-talked-about woman in the Louvre.
For the first time since its creation in 1793 in the wake of the French Revolution, the Musée du Louvre will be headed by a woman, Laurence des Cars, the current head of the Musée d’Orsay and the much smaller Musée de l’Orangerie.
Des Cars, 54, was appointed on Wednesday as the museum’s president-director by the president of France, Emmanuel Macron.
“Four years at the Orsay gave me this confidence, this crazy idea that I could be the next president of the Louvre,” des Cars said in an hourlong telephone interview. “The president probably saw that I was ready for the job and that I am somehow serene. I am not overanxious. I have to stay very calm.”
On Sept. 1, des Cars will replace the museum’s leader of eight years, Jean-Luc Martinez, who had waged an intense media campaign to stay on for a new five-year term.
The two museum directors could not be more different. Both studied art history at the École du Louvre, the museum’s prestigious school. But the Louvre has traditionally been run by upper-class art historians, and Martinez, a trained archaeologist with little expertise in painting, was the son of a postman from a working-class suburb of Paris. Des Cars, a specialist in 19th- and early-20th-century painting, is descended from a French noble family of writers.
To read the full article, click here.
5 May 2021
By Courtney Connley
In the United States, mothers working full-time, year-round make an average of just $0.75 for every dollar paid to full-time working fathers, according to a new analysis from the National Women’s Law Center.
As a result, the average working mom has to work an additional five months into the new year to reach the same pay fathers earned the previous year, leading Mother’s Equal Pay Day to fall on May 5 this year. That’s nearly two months after equal pay day was reached for women on March 24, as full-time working women on average earn just $0.82 for every dollar paid to men.
This pay gap for working mothers leads to a loss of $1,275 a month and $15,300 a year in wages. For women of color, this gap is even higher with full-time working Latina, Native American and Black moms being paid an average of $0.46, $0.50 and $0.52, respectively, for every dollar paid to white fathers.
“This loss is depriving moms of their ability to weather this [Covid-19] storm,” NWLC Director of Research Jasmine Tucker tells CNBC Make It. “We know that about one in four women who are unemployed right now have been looking for work for a year…just imagine what that $15,000 or more could do if you had that sitting in the bank because you were paid what you were owed before this all happened.”
In front-line occupations like nursing, waitressing and housekeeping, full-time working mothers are paid just $0.84, $0.67 and $0.65, respectively, for every dollar paid to full-time working fathers doing the same job.
To read the full article, click here.