Upcoming Deadlines | click here to see if you are eligible for any of these opportunities

July 31st: Community Engagement Artists and Creatives Grant, December 31st: New England Presenter Travel Fund, December 31st: Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet Scholarship, December 31st: 24 Seven Dance Convention, December 31st: National Theater Project Presenter Travel Grant, December 31st: Breck Creek Artist-in-Residence Program

×

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

Examining other art forms with historic issues in hiring women: theater, symphonic/classical music, opera. Also including more contemporary fields: lack of women in country music, hip hop, contemporary pop music, and other genres.

New York Times: Money Is Not Just for Men

/0 Comments/in /by

By Maya Salam

14 June 2019

Remember that moment in “Sex and the City” when Carrie couldn’t afford to buy her apartment because she had bought too many shoes? Worse, she’d miscalculated how much she’d spent on them by $36,000.

Sallie Krawcheck doesn’t think it’s cute — she thinks it’s a trope.

“The primary emotion women feel around money is not power or independence, but shame and loneliness,” she said. “It is actually viewed as an attractive female characteristic to be bad with money.”

Krawcheck, a former Wall Street executive, is a founder and the C.E.O. of Ellevest, an investing platform that helps women reach their financial goals.

Giving women control over their financial futures is her mission — one she spoke about yesterday at The New York Times’s New Rules Summit, a two-day conference focused on women’s leadership. (See clips from the day, including interviews with Anita Hill, Valerie Jarrett and Padma Lakshmi here.)

I caught up with Krawcheck before she went on stage. We discussed women and money, the six gender gaps that persist and what women can do to close them.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

New York Times: The Best Women’s Soccer Team in the World Fights for Equal Pay

/0 Comments/in /by

By Lizzy Goodman

10 June 2019

In spring 2018, Abby Wambach, the most decorated soccer player in American history, gave a commencement address at Barnard College that went viral. The player who had scored more goals than any other, male or female, in international competition described standing onstage at the ESPYs the year after she retired in 2015, receiving the Icon Award alongside two peers, Peyton Manning and Kobe Bryant. “I felt so grateful,” she recalled. “I had a momentary feeling of having arrived; like, we women had finally made it.” As the athletes exited the stage, each having, as Wambach put it, “left it all on the field for decades with the same ferocity, talent and commitment,” it occurred to her that while the sacrifices the men made for their careers were nearly identical to her own, their new lives would not resemble hers in one fundamental way. “Kobe and Peyton walked away from their careers with something I didn’t have: enormous bank accounts,” Wambach said. “Because of that, they had something else I didn’t have: freedom. Their hustling days were over; mine were just beginning.”

The United States women’s national team is the best in the world and has been for decades. Since the FIFA Women’s World Cup was inaugurated in 1991, the United States has won three of the seven titles, including the most recent one in 2015. Since women’s soccer became an Olympic sport in 1996, it has won four of six gold medals. The team has been ranked No.1 by FIFA for 10 of the last 11 years and has produced some of the biggest female sports stars of the last several decades, from Mia Hamm to Wambach to the current starting center forward, Alex Morgan.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

New York Times: ‘Hadestown’ Director Rachel Chavkin: Diversity ‘Is Not a Pipeline Issue’

/0 Comments/in /by

By Nancy Coleman

9 June 2019

In a Broadway season nearly devoid of female directors, the sole woman at the helm of a musical this year — Rachel Chavkin, director of “Hadestown” — took home the Tony Award for best direction of a musical.

Ms. Chavkin, who was previously nominated in the category for “Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812” in 2017, emphasized diversity in the industry in her acceptance speech Sunday night.

“There are so many women who are ready to go. There are so many artists of color who are ready to go. And we need to see that racial diversity and gender diversity reflected in our critical establishment, too,” Ms. Chavkin said in her speech. “This is not a pipeline issue. It is a failure of imagination by a field whose job is to imagine the way the world could be.”

Read the full article in The New York Times.

New York Times: Parenthood Is Still Uneven, but an Hour a Day Could Help

/0 Comments/in /by

Part of what is holding women back from leadership in ballet is a challenge for women in every field: parenting.

Maya Salam explores this topic in her latest ‘In Her Words’ for The New York Times below:

The invisible, unpaid work that women are often expected to shoulder — like raising children and managing households — is an “urgent matter” of gender justice, according to a new report on modern fatherhood.

The report, The State of the World’s Fathers, which examines data from over two dozen countries and information from nearly 12,000 people, was released this week by Promundo, a global advocacy group focused on gender-equality issues, and MenCare, a campaign focused on men’s family involvement.

Its major finding: that women still spend way more time than men, up to 10 times as much, on unpaid tasks like child care and senior care, as well as on volunteer work and domestic chores.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

The Telegraph: From female nudes to the Ballet Russe: Natalia Goncharova, the avant-garde rebel painter

/0 Comments/in /by

By Rosamund Bartlett

1 June 2019

On March 24 1910, in the heart of old Moscow, the plush surroundings of a club for the cultural elite became the scene of a scandal. In the space of a few years, the Free Aesthetics Society had achieved renown for its weekly meetings devoted to contemporary poetry, music and art. On this occasion there was to be a lecture, and the first solo exhibition of a young artist.

It was a one-day event for members only, but word had got out, and a journalist of the old school bribed a member of staff in order to gain entry, intent on exposing the decadence of this den of aesthetes. In the next morning’s paper, he denounced as an abomination the 20 or so paintings on show, singling out a few that, in his…

Read the full article in The Telegraph.

Axios: Women’s sports are having a moment

/0 Comments/in /by

By Kendall Baker

8 May 2019

In the last few months, multiple big name brands have pumped significant dollars into women’s sports, signaling that an increase in media exposure could be having a seismic impact on the business of female athletics.

Driving the news: AT&T signed a multi-year partnership with the WNBA, becoming the first non-apparel company to have its logo featured on the front of all 12 team jerseys. Barclays made the “largest single investment in British women’s sports,” signing a three-year, $11 million sponsorship deal that will see the top league rebranded as the Barclays FA Women’s Super League.

  • Budweiser announced its first-ever sponsorship of women’s soccer, inking a deal with the English national team.
  • Nike has shifted its entire business around to take advantage of what they consider to be a massive opportunity.

WNBPA director Pam Wheeler told sports business outlet, JohnWallStreet, that she believes this heightened sponsorship interest is a byproduct of the increased visibility of women’s sports.

  • The proliferation of streaming services and the rise of social media has allowed the WNBA (and others) to reach more people, and the league recently parlayed that uptick in eyeballs into a multi-year deal with CBS Sports that will nearly double its national TV exposure.

The backdrop: Brands have historically ignored women’s pro sports, as have televised news and highlight shows — two realities that go hand-in-hand.

Read the full article on Axios.

New York Times: Employers Who Talk Up Gender Equity, but Silence Harassment Victims

/0 Comments/in /by

By Emily Steel

1 May 2019

SYDNEY, Australia — Kate Jenkins was hopeful when she opened Australia’s first national inquiry into workplace sexual harassment. As a longtime employment lawyer, she had negotiated settlements for companies dealing with harassment claims. Now, as the country’s sex discrimination commissioner, she knew chief executives who were emphatic about gender equity, in pay and promotion.

Yet when she asked businesses to waive nondisclosure agreements with employees — contracts that prevented people from confidentially telling the inquiry of past harassment — only about 30 companies and institutions signed off by the deadline.

Absent were the global consultants Deloitte, PWC and Accenture; the advertising groups Interpublic Group and Dentsu; and the bank Macquarie. All of them promote International Women’s Day, a celebration of women’s achievements, and many of their executives were listed with Male Champions of Change, an Australian group that encourages diversity in the workplace.

“They all gave me technical legal reasons, but as a lawyer, I know,” Ms Jenkins said. “It is not like murder. We are asking them to waive for just one purpose. They totally could have done it.”

Read the full article in The New York Times.

The Walrus: When Male Runners Lose to Women

/0 Comments/in /by

By Leyland Cecco

2 May 2019

When alissa St Laurent set off towards the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains on a bright August morning in 2015, she was confident her intense training would be enough to finish the 125 gruelling kilometres of the Canadian Death Race. Ahead of her were three mountain peaks, leg-numbing switchback climbs, and punishing hairpin descents. In most years, fewer than half of participants finish the race, held annually since 2000, revealing the steely determination needed to overcome pain and exhaustion. But, early in the race, as St Laurent found herself among the sinewy bodies of the lead pack, a male runner looked her over and asked if she thought she could maintain the group’s brisk pace.

Frustration took hold of the then thirty-one-year-old Edmonton accountant. “I just made sure to just stay ahead of him before we got into that first transition area,” she says. St Laurent also remained ahead of every other runner, building an insurmountable lead through determination and patience. After thirteen hours and fifty-one minutes, largely spent racing against herself, she crossed the finish line to become the first woman in the race’s history to win outright. Her closest competitor was nearly an hour-and-a-half behind. She doesn’t know what became of the man who thought she was going too fast too early—only that she left him in her dust.

Read the full article in The Walrus.

The Stage: Stephen Arnell: How Bob Fosse’s legacy is being re-examined in the age of #MeToo

/0 Comments/in /by

By Stephen Arnell

14 May 2019

With regular revivals of his stage musicals such as Chicago, Pippin and Sweet Charity, the work of groundbreaking theatremaker Bob Fosse has never really gone away.

This year, UK fans of his musicals will see a different side to the director-choreographer with the FX mini-series Fosse/Verdon – screened in the US before heading to this side of the Atlantic – and Sky Arts’ documentary Bob Fosse: It’s Showtime.

From the trailers promoting the show, FX appears to have spared no expense; the show stars Sam Rockwell as Fosse and Michelle Williams as Gwen Verdon, and has a production team that includes Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.

It aims to give Fosse’s third wife Verdon the credit many believe has hardly been acknowledged despite her huge contribution to his stage and film work.

In the age of #MeToo, Fosse/Verdon – which has the backing of their daughter Nicole – has particular relevance in confronting Fosse’s reputation as a drug abuser, epic boozer, serial womaniser – and looking back today – maybe darker issues.

The Sky Arts documentary – which I wrote and co-produced – also delves into this area, illustrating Fosse’s ‘don’t take no for answer’ attitude from his targets with this telling quote from a People magazine article in 1980 – one which he didn’t refute: “You can assume he’s going to try to make you,” a corps member said. “He tries with every girl and gets a fair percentage. He’s so casual. He doesn’t give you much respect.”

He was constantly helping the female dancers with their positions, working their legs apart with his hands and wrapping his arms around them to get their hips just so. “He’s not easily discouraged,” says one. “If you tell him you’re engaged, he keeps asking if the wedding hasn’t been called off.”

In his own words: “I drink too much, I smoke too much, I take pills too much, I work too much, I girl around too much, I everything too much.”

To an extent, Fosse admitted his character flaws and dark side (“I drank Scotch. I did cocaine and a lot of Dexedrine. I’d wake up in the morning, pop a pill”), which has inoculated him against some of the blowback.

In his autobiographical All That Jazz from 1979, Fosse put himself under the microscope, although some commentators thought that his vanity competed with a desire for honesty in the movie.

Read the full article on The Stage.

Performing ArtsHub: Opera and the doing of women

/0 Comments/in /by

By Sally Blackwood, Liza Lim, Peggy Polias, & Bree van Reyk

As reported by Alison Croggon in Opera and the invisibility of women, the New Opera Workshop (NOW2019) held in Brisbane in Aprilhighlighted the entrenched bias, the structural nature of sexism and other exclusionary forces that are reflected in many of the norms, expectations and practices of opera as an artform.

The conference was an invitation to practitioners to evolve new thinking for opera in the 21st century and it is in this spirit that we – and our co-signatories below – are making a call for change. 

NOW is the time for the opera sector to step up and join the conversation about gender equity, diversity and the championing of a multiplicity of voices. On the brink of redefining the Major Performing Arts Framework and in the wake of the National Opera Review Discussion Paper and Final Report, we ask that these points be urgently addressed. Now is the time for opera in Australia to evolve and to lead the way with diversity on our stages, in our creative teams, and on our panels. We are calling for a better vision for opera in its work practices and as an art form.

We demand a national commitment to systemic change:

  1. We want diversity to be reflected in all aspects of the opera we experience.
  2. We call for a questioning of the systemic acceptance of gender-based violence in opera.
  3. We want recognition, respect, advocacy and support for creators who are female, non-binary and from diverse cultural backgrounds.
  4. We call for safe inclusive spaces for people with diverse voices and abilities to set the agenda, to lead the conversation, to have a resonant voice.
  5. We want to decolonise the distribution of power so that the stories and creative work of women and all people with diverse voices resonate equally with that of men.
  6. We call for an unprecedented commitment to the programming and commissioning of new Australian opera work with gender and cultural diversity at the forefront.
  7. We call for those in leadership to back us and that the act of hearing be prioritised alongside the act of speaking.

Read the full call to action on the Performing ArtsHub.