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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

DDP will cover stories from the corporate, for profit world regarding issues surrounding pay equity and transparency where relevant, such as other industries with low representation of women: tech, the sciences, venture capital, the entertainment industry, etc. to examine parallels between these male dominated spheres where informal hiring and word of mouth is the norm.

NPR: Enough Already: Multiple Demands Causing Women To Abandon Workforce

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By Avie Schneider, Andrea Hsu, & Scott Horsley

2 October 2020

Here’s a stunning stat: Women are leaving the workforce at four times the rate as men.

The burden of parenting and running a household while also working a job during the pandemic has created a pressure cooker environment in many households, and women are bearing the brunt of it.

It has come to a head as a new school year starts with many children staying home instead of returning to their classrooms in person because of the pandemic. And its forcing many women to make a difficult choice and drop out of the workforce altogether.

Just in September, 865,000 women over 20 dropped out of the American workforce compared with 216,000 men in the same age group, the Labor Department reported Friday.

“It was a really startling difference,” said University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson. “The child care crisis is wreaking havoc on women’s employment.”

Youli Lee is one of those women who hit the breaking point of working from home while caring for her children. She took a leave of absence from her federal job after finding it impossible to do her normal work from home while her three children — ages 8, 11, and 13 — were also at home doing virtual school.

Listen to the coverage or read the full article here.

The Salt Lake Tribune: Ballet West will start letting dancers wear tights and shoes in their own skin color

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By Sean P. Means

1 October 2020

Ballet West dancers soon will be wearing tights and shoes that more closely resemble their own skin color — an effort to push back against a white bias in the ballet world going back decades.

“I believe a more diverse and inclusive organization is a stronger Ballet West,” Adam Sklute, Ballet West’s artistic director, said in a statement issued by the troupe Thursday. “It is time we hold a mirror to ourselves and examine how our art form — and how Ballet West — can do better in dismantling systems that do not foster equity, and to institutionalize structures that do.”

The Salt Lake City-based troupe announced a series of policy changes to make Ballet West’s studio and stage “more welcoming to dancers of color.” These changes are:

• Ballet West will no longer allow makeup that indicates a race or ethnicity other than the dancer’s own.

• The troupe will no longer use historic “paling” body makeup for women in works — “Swan Lake” and “Giselle” are mentioned — whose major roles are traditionally depicted as pale white.

• The company will provide tights and shoe straps that more closely match the dancer’s skin tone.

Read the full article here.

Pointe Magazine: “My Plate Is Full”: Sofiane Sylve on Her New Leadership Roles at Ballet San Antonio and Dresden Semperoper

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By Claudia Bauer

28 September 2020

Sofiane Sylve had huge plans for 2020: Departing her post as a principal dancer at San Francisco Ballet, she embarked on a multifaceted, bicontinental career as ballet master and principal dancer at Dresden Semperoper Ballett, and artistic advisor and school director at Ballet San Antonio—and then COVID-19 hit, sidelining performances and administrative plans at both companies. But ballet dancers are nothing if not resilient. In her new leadership roles, Sylve is determined to help shepherd ballet through this challenging time—and transform it for the better. Pointe caught up with her by phone while she was in Dresden.

You started these amazing new positions, and then COVID happened. How have you had to adapt?

In Dresden, La Bayadère can’t happen because of the amount of people in the cast, and the costumes and wigs. BSA had to cancel October’s Don Quixote. We’re not sure Nutcracker is going to happen. I can’t have it on my conscience to have 25 dancers in a room, even if I do everything in San Antonio that Germany has been doing. In Germany, you have to wear a mask everywhere you go, and you can’t use the dressing rooms. They open the studios five minutes before you can go in, it’s only an hour class, they shuffle you out and clean for the entire hour. You need cleaning staff 24/7—no U.S. company has a budget for that.

How are you juggling these pivotal responsibilities at two companies—not to mention the travel?

I wanted my plate to be full, and it’s full, and I’m loving it. But with COVID, the travel is very difficult—I can get into Texas, but I could get stuck because of travel restrictions. I am on Zoom all day; I’ve hired BSA dancers and ballet masters on Zoom, and we do a lot of classes online. You see people in their homes, they see me running around with my dogs. In a way, it’s made us seem more human to each other.

Read the full article here.

Washington Post: Ford Foundation fund to award an unprecedented $160 million to minority arts groups

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By Geoff Edgers

24 September 2020

Eduardo Vilaro, the artistic director and chief executive of New York’s Ballet Hispánico, has tried to ignore the slights. Well-heeled patrons who wouldn’t join his board because they favored older, Whiter organizations. Theater managers telling him they couldn’t present the company because they had already programmed a “minority-themed” group.

And like so many self-described institutions of color, Ballet Hispánico has a tiny endowment, about $1 million. New York City Ballet, just a cab ride away in Manhattan, has $220 million in the bank, according to its most recent audit. With so little saved up, Ballet Hispánico’s ambitions are perpetually limited.

But next year will be different. The Ford Foundation this week is announcing an unprecedented $160 million-and-growing initiative called America’s Cultural Treasures, with substantial grants going to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) organizations across the country. The grants are, in most cases, the largest ever for the 20 recipients in the first round. Ballet Hispánico will receive $4 million, more than half of its $7 million annual budget.

“It takes an ice pick to this huge glacier of structural white supremacy,” Vilaro says. “This is reorganizing and saying, ‘We have other national treasures that we need to refocus on.’ ”

This is the Ford Foundation’s latest and most dramatic salvo in President Darren Walker’s bid to reinvent how Americans — and most important, American philanthropists — value theater companies, museums and the arts overall. The gap between rich, largely White institutions and younger, BIPOC organizations is wide, but Walker says he sees an opportunity for change now. The killing of George Floyd brought attention to the systemic racism in American society. The pandemic shutdowns drew attention to the financial gulf in the arts world.

“Just as inequality is playing out in our society, in the arts it is playing out,” Walker says. “The Getty and the National Gallery of Art are in their own bubbles. Yes, they’re concerned about finances, but as one of them said to me, ‘This is terrible, but we can raise the money.’

“When you get to the medium and smaller arts organizations — that don’t have endowments, that don’t have rich boards, that don’t have huge amounts of operating cash flow — those organizations are panicked. If we don’t help them, they will be gone.”

Even such blue-chip institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Boston Symphony Orchestra have made painful cuts in recent months, but Walker and other philanthropy leaders have feared that many organizations run by and serving people of color might have to shutter for good.

In June, the 84-year-old Ford Foundation, which has increasingly focused on fighting economic and racial disparity since Walker took over in 2013, announced that it would borrow $1 billion by issuing bonds to help nonprofit groups in every area it funds. And behind the scenes, Walker was working on something focused entirely on culture: A plan to distribute $85 million of that total to organizations run by and in communities of color for what would become America’s Cultural Treasures.

He would not do it alone. Walker began to recruit other foundations to join the mission. Kate Levin, who oversees the arts program at Bloomberg Philanthropies, particularly appreciated the reshuffling invoked by the initiative’s name. Bloomberg is giving $10 million.

“Calling them ‘America’s Cultural Treasures’ recognizes that they are excellent but have suffered the impact of systemic racism by being undercapitalized,” Levin says. “This is a situation that’s been in place a long time now, but it’s time to take action.”

The Ford plan is meant as more than a one-time coronavirus bailout. The network of foundations and donors is providing money that will go to the recipients over four years, presumably long after theaters and museums reopen. And the excitement over a establishing this new set of “treasures” has been contagious.

As of this week, Ford’s initial $85 million commitment spawned $80 million more in giving, which includes Bloomberg, the MacArthur Foundation ($5 million), the Abrams Foundation ($5 million) and the Alice L. Walton Foundation ($5 million).

The first 20 grant recipients, picked by Ford in consultation with the national donors, are geographically and racially diverse. They include the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Mich.; the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage; the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Apollo Theater in New York; the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico in San Juan; and the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Seattle. The $1 million to $6 million grants are unrestricted, so the recipients can use them on whatever they choose.

Read the entire article here.

New York Times: The Metropolitan Opera Won’t Reopen for Another Year

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By Michael Cooper

23 September 2020

The Metropolitan Opera announced Wednesday that the still-untamed coronavirus pandemic has forced it to cancel its entire 2020-21 season, prolonging one of the gravest crises it has faced in its 137-year history and keeping it dark until next September.

The decision is likely to send ripples of concern through New York and the rest of the country, as Broadway theaters, symphony halls, rock venues, comedy clubs, dance spaces and other live arts institutions grapple with the question of when it will be safe again to perform indoors. Far from being a gilded outlier, the Met, the nation’s largest performing arts organization, may well prove to be a bellwether.

The outbreak has kept the 3,800-seat opera house closed since mid-March, sapping it of more than $150 million in revenue and leaving roughly 1,000 full-time employees, including its world-class orchestra and chorus, furloughed without pay since April. Now, with the virus still too much of a threat to allow for a reopening on New Year’s Eve, as hoped, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, is making plans to adapt to a world transformed by the pandemic, including by trying to curb the company’s high labor costs.

“The future of the Met relies upon it being artistically as powerful as ever, if not more so,” Mr. Gelb said in an interview. “The artistic experiences have to be better than ever before to attract audiences back. Where we need to cut back is costs.”

As he canceled the current season, Mr. Gelb announced an ambitious lineup for 2021-22 to reassure donors and ticket buyers that the Met has robust plans. An even more difficult effort will play out offstage: Mr. Gelb said he would ask the company’s powerful unions to agree to cost-cutting concessions that he said would be necessary in the post-pandemic world, and which a number of other prominent performing arts organizations have begun to implement.

The Met plans to return to its stage next September with Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first time it will mount an opera by a Black composer — a long-overdue milestone, and part of a new focus on contemporary works alongside the ornate productions of canonical pieces for which the company is famous. The Met will also experiment with earlier curtain times, shortening some operas and offering more family fare as it tries to lure back audiences.

Read the full NYT article here.

Dance Magazine: Why Do Mixed-Rep Companies Still Rely on Ballet for Company Class?

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By Zachary Whittenburg

21 September 2020

In a single performance by a mixed-rep company, you might see its shape-shifting dancers performing barefoot, in sneakers and in heels. While such a group may have “ballet” in its name and even a rack of tutus in storage, its current relationship to the art form can be tenuous at best. That disconnect grows wider every year as contemporary choreographers look beyond ballet—if not beyond white Western forms entirely—in search of new inspiration and foundational techniques.

Yet dancers at almost all of the world’s leading mixed-rep ensembles take ballet classes before rehearsals and shows. Most companies rarely depart from ballet more than twice a week and some never offer alternative classes.

“The question, ‘Why do you take ballet class to prepare you for repertory which is not strictly classical?’ has been in the air since Diaghilev’s time,” says Peter Lewton-Brain, Monaco-based president of the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science. “What you’re doing onstage is often not what you’re doing in class.”

Thanks to campaigns for greater cultural and racial equity in the arts, many inspired or strengthened by Black Lives Matter, there’s more self-awareness today among those who might’ve once proudly declared that ballet is “the foundation of all dance.”

That’s a fallacy, but it rests on assumptions that remain in circulation, says Los Angeles–based Jermaine Spivey, staging artist for Crystal Pite and a regular performer with Kidd Pivot. “It’s centered around a white person’s idea of the world—a white person’s idea of abstract, a white person’s idea of conceptualism or expressionism, and then everything else is ‘included.’ We’re ‘diversifying,’ but we’re still based on the same principles as before. Everyone has to get comfortable with decentralizing whiteness and then ballet will fall where it needs to fall.”

Read the full Dance Magazine article here.

Washington Post: Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave her life to the country- and her heart to the performing arts

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By Peter Marks

19 September 2020

On a frigid night in January 2003, I darted out of Signature Theatre in Arlington after a performance of the musical “110 in the Shade.” I’m often the first person out of the theater — a critic’s habit — but on this night, I spotted an older man rushing ahead of me toward a limo and a petite woman on the periphery of my vision, carefully negotiating an icy patch.

“Ruth,” the man called out, “move your ass!”

As it sunk in that this was the esteemed associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and her husband, Marty, I felt that special twinge of Washington privilege: to have witnessed a funny, unguarded moment in the life of a revered public servant. She became a real person to me in that instant, just someone who, like me, loved the theater and was now trying to beat the post-show crush, though not at quite the pace her companion was setting.

On countless nights to follow over the years, I would see Justice Ginsburg in the theaters of Washington, on the occasions critics were invited to Arena Stage and Signature Theatre and Shakespeare Theatre Company. She was the most faithful patron of the performing arts in the upper echelons of officialdom I have ever known. Often, she was seated in front of me or just across the aisle, and I had to resist the temptation to watch her instead of the production. Or to lean over and whisper: How do you have time to sit on the Supreme Court all day and schlep in the evening to see “West Side Story?”

The answer was obvious. She couldn’t stay away. That’s what passion for the arts does to a person.

Read the full article here.

 

 

ABC4: Legendary Hispanic Ballerina announced as new Director at Ballet West Academy

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By Tracy Smith

18 September 2020

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (ABC4 News) – World-renowned and legendary ballerina Evelyn Cisneros-Legate has been announced as the new Director of all four campuses of Utah’s Frederic Quinney Lawson Ballet West Academy.

Originally from Huntington Beach, California, Evelyn trained at the San Francisco Ballet School, and the School of American Ballet. She joined the San Francisco Ballet when it was under the direction of Lew Christensen, brother of Ballet West’s Found, William Christensen.

According to a press release sent to ABC4 News, “when she was performing she became the San Franciso Ballet’s “prima-ballerina” and then became an international star under Christensen, Michael Smuin, and Helgi Tómasson.”

While at San Francisco Ballet, Cisneros-Legate was the first Mexican American to be elevated to a Principal Dancer in the United States. She was named “100 Influentials” by Hispanic Business and the Huffington Post called her one of the “17 ballet icons who are changing the face of dance today.” Cisneros-Legate has been featured on the covers of Dance Magazine, Ballet News, and Hispanic Magazine.

Read the full article here.

Dance Magazine: The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Just Awarded Four Dance Artists $275,000 Each

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By Jennifer Stahl

17 September 2020

At a time when many artists are feeling more financially strained than ever before, one of the most coveted grants in the arts is expanding. The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation has responded to the economic crisis by handing out eight Doris Duke Artist Awards, up from six in 2019.

What’s more, half of those have gone to dance artists: Ana María Alvarez of CONTRA-TIEMPO in Los Angeles, Sean Dorsey of San Francisco’s Sean Dorsey Dance and Fresh Meat Festival, Rennie Harris of Philadelphia’s Rennie Harris Puremovement and New York City contemporary choreographer Pam Tanowitz.

The 2020 Doris Duke Artist Awards come with a $275,000 grant—$250,000 of which is completely unrestricted, plus $25,000 meant to encourage savings for retirement.

This year’s other awardees include jazz musicians Andrew Cyrille and Cécile McLorin Salvant and playwrights Michael John Garcés and Dael Orlandersmith.

Read the full article here.

TRG Arts: Arts and Culture Comeback Planning: September 2020

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By TRG Arts

17 September 2020

Sharp Fall in Optimism Among U.S. Arts and Culture Organizations for Return to In-Person Performances in 2020

September Study Reveals Increase in U.K. and Decline in Canadian Organizations’ Optimism

TRG Arts published its findings to an initial study of 74 clients’ performance return plans in June 2020. The findings from that report can be found here. An update to that study, expanded to 133 arts and culture organizations across three countries and published in July, reflected waning optimism for an autumn return to in-person live performances and a formal turn to paid digital programming after shutdowns caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The study was refreshed and expanded on September 2, 2020, and represents 219 organizations’ current scenario plans for returning to in-person paid performance, as well as those same organizations’ plans for offering paid digital programming. Responses reflect arts and culture organizations across all disciplines of arts and culture in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The study does not contemplate howclient organizations will operationalize live in-person performances. TRG has learned the delivery method and specifics for returning to in-person performances are highly variable, and rely on national and local guidance.

Regional Outlooks Reflect Level of Viral Containment

As the number of Americans testing positive for COVID-19 continues to grow, optimism for a 2020 in-person return to performances sharply fell for U.S. arts and culture leaders. The September study reveals 23% of U.S. organizations expect to perform to in-person audiences in 2020, compared to 61% in the initial June study.

Positive containment and infection reduction in the U.K. reveal more optimism for a 2020 in-person return to performances, while flaring cases in some provinces of Canada decreased optimism as described in Table 1.

Read the full study here.