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DDP Talks To

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

New York Times: In Her Words: For Three Suffragists, a Monument Well Past Due

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By Alisha Haridasani Gupta

6 August 2020

Across the country, monuments honoring racist figures are being defaced and toppled. In New York’s Central Park, one statue is taking shape that aims to amend not only racial but also gender disparities in public art: A 14-foot-tall bronze monument of Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, three of the more prominent leaders in the nationwide fight for women’s right to vote

Called the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument, it is to be unveiled Aug. 26 to commemorate the 100th anniversary this month of the constitutional amendment that finally guaranteed women that right, depicts the three figures gathered around a table for what seems to be a discussion or a strategy meeting. Anthony stands in the middle, holding a pamphlet that reads “Votes for Women”; Stanton, seated to her left, holds a pen, presumably taking notes; and Truth appears to be in midsentence.

“I wanted to show women working together,” said Meredith Bergmann, the sculptor chosen from dozens of artists to create the statue. “I kept thinking of women now, working together in some kitchen on a laptop, trying to change the world.”

Read the full article here.

Charlotte Ballet: #WOMENINCHOREO Wednesday with Stephanie Martinez

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17 June 2020

Since Artistic Director Hope Muir took the helm of Charlotte Ballet in 2018 the company has commissioned work into the repertoire from female choreographers each season. Women have long been underrepresented in creative roles with professional dance companies, but thanks to Muir Charlotte Ballet has a renewed commitment to providing opportunities to these intelligent and inspiring choreographers. We are excited about this new social mini-series #WomeninChoreo Wednesday where you will get to hear advice directly from those women, as well as gather insight as to how they are fueling their creative outlets during their time at home.⁠

OUR CHAT WITH STEPHANIE MARTINEZ

1. With theaters closed and schedules disrupted through the crisis of Covid 19, how are you engaging with your art and staying both active and creative?

I’ve been taking class at home, it’s been fun to join classes that I wouldn’t normally be able to attend. I’ve also been reading “True and False” by David Mamet which covers different acting techniques. I’m trying to dig into different art forms and expand my thinking beyond the realm of dance so that I can bring a richer perspective to my work once we’re back in the studio.

2. Every creative process is unique in its own way, can you describe your experience working with Charlotte Ballet and how it may have differed from other companies?

When I create a ballet, especially for the work at Charlotte Ballet, it’s crucial for me to conceptualize and build an environment first. The reality is that an empty space can be a bit paralyzing, so I like to give very clear, specific tasks to the room so that we’re all working collectively towards creating something that feels honest, alive, and satisfying. The dancers at Charlotte Ballet are extremely passionate and have a fascination for exploration that continuously improves their skill level. I’ll be honest, Charlotte Ballet is one of my favorite companies that I’ve had the honor of working with to date. The dancers are open and curious, demanding a lot of themselves and producing an environment that any choreographer would love to work in. I could see the dancers growing day-to-day, trusting their instincts, making new choices, and building characters that were truthful and compelling. It is not a cookie-cutter company, but each individual in the room worked toward a united standard of excellence set by Hope’s leadership.

Read the full Q&A here.

Pointe: Annabelle Lopez Ochoa Has Been Choreographing Up a Storm on Zoom and Learning How to Create Dance on Film

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By Laura Cappelle

31 July 2020

“Can you caress the wall?,” Annabelle Lopez Ochoa said, frowning to get a better sense of the dancers’ living room on her screen. It was April, and the contemporary ballet choreographer was trying something new. Together with two dancers from the Norwegian National Ballet, Julie Gardette and François Rousseau, she was creating a piece entirely over Zoom—the first of what she now calls “a video diary of what dancers do inside.”

What was originally a one-off celebration for Rousseau, whose stage farewell was cancelled due to the pandemic, has turned into a larger creative project for Ochoa. Since then, from her house in Amsterdam, she has taken to creating dance films, all three to five minutes in length, with performers around the world. Dancers from Tulsa Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, Dutch National Ballet and more have already taken part, with others scheduled in the coming months.

Ochoa had to rush to fly out of Tulsa in March, where she had been re-staging her ballet Vendetta, just before international travel was banned. Being stuck at home instead of going from commission to commission prompted some soul-searching. “We’re all forced to go back to point zero. It made me reflect not just on the pieces that I’ve made, but on the artist that I am,” she says. Working with dancers again proved energizing. “What do I like in choreography? I noticed, being on Zoom, that it’s the interaction.”

The early sessions were bumpy. Gardette and Rousseau had to alternate between leaning in close to their screen to see corrections and dancing from enough distance for Ochoa to see the bigger picture. The music proved the biggest hurdle, however. “It was delayed, so I would hear 1, 2, 3, and they would hear pause… 1, 2, 3,” the choreographer says.

She figured out a way to share music that causes less delay (although Ochoa says synchronization is still an issue). One hour on Zoom is now enough for her to craft one minute of choreography, and the dancers she asked to participate generally jumped at the chance to do more than staying in shape while sheltering in place. “It’s not the same just doing ballet class at home: you don’t have that collaboration energy of learning choreography,” Maine Kawashima, a soloist with Tulsa Ballet, says.

Read the full article here.

New York Times: What Is It Like to Watch Live Dance Again? Amazing

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By Gia Kourlas

3 August 2020

TIVOLI, N.Y. — It didn’t bode well that the first live dance I was going to see since mid-March was one I had seen many times before. “Sunshine,” a Larry Keigwin war horse set to the Bill Withers’s classic “Ain’t No Sunshine,” can give a dancer the opportunity to really feel the music in all the worst ways. It’s treacly stuff.

So I’m happy to say that as soon as Melvin Lawovi began to move, my chest tightened; I even sensed — the horror — some tears. Lately, for self-preservation, I’ve been talking myself into believing that I can live without watching dance in person, and while that is true, I clearly miss it. A lot. “Sunshine,” which opened the outdoor Kaatsbaan Summer Festival under beautiful blue skies on Saturday, worked out just fine.

That was also to the credit of Mr. Lawovi, a recent addition to American Ballet Theater, who never delivered a treacly moment as he traversed the stage with the lightest touch. Instead of dwelling on the lyrics or giving into angst, he danced with an unparalleled polish, as if his body were clearing the air.

But repertory alone doesn’t seem the be all end all of this summer festival, the first of its kind in Kaatsbaan’s 30 years as a cultural park. From the performances to Brandon Stirling Baker’s light-and-sound installation in a rustic barn to the peace of being surrounded by so much open space and air, the festival is not only about live dance. It’s a package. The best choreographic moments came in the dancers’ simple yet courtly walks across the grass to the stage.

Kaatsbaan’s artistic director, Stella Abrera, and its executive director, Sonja Kostich, aren’t messing around when it comes to safety, and that was comforting, too, at this socially distanced performance. The experience included frantically filling out the health check survey in the car while thinking hard about the questions: Was that a touch of a sore throat this morning?

I loved the elegant firmness of the handwritten signs telling us to wear masks; the raised stage that seemed like it was dropped from the sky onto a field; and the optional post-performance walk, on the grounds of what was originally a farm, with live music (instead of a meandering or self-congratulatory post-performance talk).

Read the full article here.

The Guardian: The ‘shecession’: why economic crisis is affecting women more than men

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By Amanda Holpuch

4 August 2020

Denise Frederick hasn’t stopped working since the pandemic began. But the nanny and home carer in New York City has also seen her pay cut in both jobs and she is uncertain about how long she will have either with the coronavirus outbreak far from under control.

Like many women, the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic has hit Frederick hard. For the first time in history, the US is in a “shecession” – an economic downturn where job and income losses are affecting women more than men.

The family Frederick worked for left the city in the early days of the outbreak, but continued to pay her normally until last month when they cut her pay to hire a nanny where they are staying. They don’t know if they will return to the city before her contract expires at the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Frederick’s pay was cut at her home carer job, which she has commuted to on the bus and subway since the pandemic began and where she has to pay for her own personal protective equipment (PPE).

Frederick, a single mother, moved from St Lucia four years ago to fulfill a life goal: to put her 19-year-old daughter through college. “I keep saying to her, focus on school, let me figure out where the next meal is going to come from, let me figure out how the bills are going to get paid, because I don’t want her to get stressed out about me and then it’s affecting her grades,” Frederick said.

In the Great Recession, men lost twice as many jobs as women. But from February to May, 11.5 million women lost their jobs compared with 9 million men because of business closures intended to stop the spread of Covid-19. By the end of April, women’s job losses had erased a decade of employment gains.

The staggering figures have underlined the changing nature of the workforce and brought into focus the overlooked issues attached to that shift. Women, especially women of color, are more vulnerable to sudden losses of income because of the gender pay gap and are more dependent on childcare and school to be able to work.

Read the full article here.

New York Times: In Her Words: Finish the Fight!

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By Veronica Chambers, Jennifer Schuessler, Amisha Padnani, Jennifer Harlan, Sandra E. Garcia and Vivian Wang

28 July 2020

It took the better part of a century to pass a law saying American women had the right to vote. Three generations of women, and their male allies, worked tirelessly to make the 19th Amendment — which decreed that states could not discriminate at the polls on the basis of sex — a reality. We call the right to vote “suffrage,” but for a long time, that word was a kind of shorthand for women’s rights. Without the vote, suffragists argued, women had little say over their lives and their futures and certainly much less when it came to the larger political questions that shaped the nation.

The 19th Amendment is a cornerstone of gender equality in our country, yet many of us know very little about the way the right to vote was won. For a long time, the history of the suffrage movement has been told mainly as the story of a few famous white women, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. It’s true they were among the most important leaders of the movement in the 19th century.

The 19th Amendment is a cornerstone of gender equality in our country, yet many of us know very little about the way the right to vote was won. For a long time, the history of the suffrage movement has been told mainly as the story of a few famous white women, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. It’s true they were among the most important leaders of the movement in the 19th century.

Mary Church Terrell and the Power of Language

Sometimes freedom is a matter of timing. Mary Church Terrell knew that lesson well. She was born in Memphis in September 1863 — the middle of the Civil War. Her parents had been enslaved, but Mary was born free, and she charted a course of leadership that helped change the lives of women and men across the nation. She became a suffragist. She fought for the rights of all people of color. Holding America to the promises of the Declaration of Independence — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all — became her life’s work.

These dreams were supported by her parents. Her father, Robert Church, was the son of an enslaved woman and a wealthy steamship owner who had allowed Robert to keep his wages. After Robert gained his freedom, he invested in real estate and became wealthy.

Read the full article online here.

Elizabeth Yntema of the Dance Data Project®: 5 Things We Need To Do To Close The Gender Wage Gap

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By Candice Georgiadis

28 July 2020

I had the pleasure of interviewing Elizabeth Yntema.

Elizabeth Yntema is the President & Founder of the Dance Data Project®. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for WTTW/WFMT, the Advisory Board of the Trust for Public Land in Illinois and the Board of Directors of the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre. Liza was graduated from the University of Virginia in 1980 and is 1984 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, where she was awarded the annual prize for Outstanding Contribution to Social Justice. Ms. Yntema is a past member of numerous organizations in the Chicagoland area, including the Joffrey Ballet, Hubbard Street Dance Company, Women’s Bar Association, Winnetka Board of the Northwestern Settlement House, the Children’s Home and Aid Society, and the Junior League of Chicago, where she was named as Volunteer of the Year for her work advocating for homeless women and children.

Named to the final full year training cohort of The Philanthropy Workshop (TPW) in 2018, Liza spent a year honing her skills as part of “the next generation of strategic philanthropists.” TPW is a global network of over 450 selected philanthropists, from 22 countries.

Ms. Yntema has underwritten ballets for Sacramento and Pacific Northwest Ballets, the Joffrey Ballet, Hubbard Street Dance Company and BalletX, including world premieres by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa (Mammatus) & Stephanie Martinez’s (Bliss!) She has also supported works by Penny Saunders, Robyn Minenko Williams, Amy Seiwert and Eva Stone, as well as Nicolas Blanc and Christopher Wheeldon. Liza was Lead Sponsor of Crystal Pite’s work Solo Echo as part of the celebration of the 40th Anniversary of Hubbard Street Dance Company.

In May 2018, American Ballet Theatre announced the launch of its ABT Women’s Movement, a multi-year initiative supporting the creation of new works by female choreographers for the company. Ms. Yntema, along with the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund, was an initial Principal Sponsor for this initiative and continues to support its development. Ms. Yntema recently joined the Boston Ballet’s multi-year initiative ChoreograpHER as a Lead Sponsor. Liza also actively supports the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s choreographic initiative for female students, New Voices.

Thank you so much for joining us Elizabeth! Can you tell us the “backstory” that brought you to this career path?

Iam the product of generations of strong women. My mother was Senior Editor at Atlantic Monthly Little Brown, and I remember visiting her offices as a child. After graduating from University of Michigan Law School, I moved to Chicago, where I worked for a management labor firm. Taking time off from full time work, I spent a great deal of time volunteering, and moved on to more organized philanthropy.

As I looked around not for profit board rooms, I observed that almost all of the important positions, the C-Suite, higher paying jobs, are held by men. It turned into a sort-of “cubicles and windows” test. I would walk into the back offices/working areas of charities, and would discover rows of young women in little airless boxes. When I came across an office with a window, I found it was far more likely to be inhabited by a man. Finally, I would get to the big corner offices, and here the occupants are almost exclusively middle-aged, white men.

I advocate for women and girls in all aspects of my life and work, but I realized that while classical dance is a global, multi-billion a year industry with hundreds of thousands of girls & women heading to class each week, it was also amenable to reform. I have no interest in beating my head against a wall. I want to make real, lasting change, rapidly. With ballet — the timing was right thanks to the #TimesUp and #MeToo movements and with the scandals at the largest US ballet company, The New York City Ballet, I am familiar with the world of classical dance.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this career?

I think the most interesting story about DDP is how my team has pulled everything together, while working remotely, in such a short amount of time. The more I learn, the more I realize Dance Data Project® is upending how not for profits operate and charities are “supposed to be” run.

We will have produced 8 groundbreaking studies our first year, with a young team (oldest member besides me is mid 30s), dispersed throughout the US. All but my Research Director have other “gigs.” When senior fundraising professionals hear that DDP staff consultants are located in: Seattle, New York, Florida, Nashville, Utah, Chicago and its suburbs, their jaws hang open. However, I recently spoke with Jeremy Edwards, Senior Associate Dean, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago. He also works as a consultant for not-for-profits seeking transformational change. When I described how my team works and traditional fundraisers’ skepticism, he laughed and said that this is how all successful not-for-profits will be run in the future, as it eliminates excess overhead. As I said to him, “we don’t have meetings.”

Picture us in the Summer of 2018: My first hire was off pursuing a career as a consultant in New York City, but still “in the game” and helping us move beyond a data base to a public presence. Her intern, my now Research Director, had just graduated from university, and was pitching in part time, remotely from a small city in France where she taught school. My website designer is in the city, and his graphics wizard is on the West Coast. My amazing administrative assistant, also part time, was holding the fort back home while I was traveling. Committed to hiking the Northern Route of the Camino De Santiago, I ended up with my computer in my backpack, navigating tiny village to even smaller “not really there” places with super sketchy internet. So, everyone was giving feedback and editing from wildly different time zones. Yet, working together, and adjusting for schedules, we produced a gorgeous website featuring important content. DIY in the best possible way. Experimental, kind of out there, but it works.

Read the full article here.

2019-2020 Season Overview Release

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Dance Data Project® (DDP) today releases its 2019-2020 Season Overview, a statistical examination of choreographer gender within the seasons of the Top 50 U.S. companies. This year’s report indicates a significant increase in programming equity from last year, but men remain favored in almost every category.

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DANCE DATA PROJECT® TO RELEASE PART 2 OF GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS SERIES, FEATURING THE BALLET WORLD’S TOP LEADERS AND THEIR METHODS FOR CRISIS NAVIGATION

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Dance Data Project® (DDP) today announced the release of Global Conversations – Navigating Challenging Times, the second round in a series of virtual interviews. Round 2 features 10 artistic directors, executive directors, and CEOs of some of the most globally esteemed ballet companies. See the full roster in the announcement.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer: Philly’s daring BalletX taps choreographers around the world for subscription-based film festival

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By Ellen Dunkel

21 July 2020

Nutcracker performances have been canceled, theaters sit empty, and dancers all over the world are wondering how to salvage their careers.

But BalletX artistic director Christine Cox has not let coronavirus prevent her company from leaping into the future.

“There was a panic moment,” Cox said. “At first you’re managing the crises by shutting down your performances, which is something we did early. And then slowly as the season was developing, in my mind, [there was] this idea of going big.”

The plan, which Cox announced Tuesday morning, is a new series launching Sept. 10 celebrating the company’s 15th anniversary with world premieres by 15 choreographers. She sees the season in terms of a subscription-based film festival with nine shorts and six features.

The shorts will be dance films presented on a new virtual platform hosted on the company’s website called BalletX Beyond. The features are intended to be performed live in the spring or summer, depending on public health concerns, but they, too, may be turned into films, if necessary.

Read the full story here.