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
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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
With this Data Byte, Dance Data Project® examines the role of resident choreographers at prominent dance companies for the third year annually. For the first time, this research analyzes 270 companies, a significant increase from the 143 companies previously studied.
For this study, Dance Data Project® compiled a list of 125 ballet companies, supplemented by DDP’s list of the Largest 50 U.S. Ballet Companies, which is updated annually and published in the Artistic and Executive Leadership Report. Together, this is a sample of 175 ballet companies from 56 countries, representing the most prominent ballet companies around the world. To combat the Eurocentrism of ballet and DDP’s own bias as a U.S.-based organization, additional time was given to researching ballet companies in Asia, Africa, South America, and Central America. DDP advisors were also consulted to provide as complete a survey as possible.
This Data Byte details artistic director changes at ballet companies globally which occurred in 2021 or have been announced for 2022 and later. The highlighted rows indicate companies which have announced the departure of their artistic director but have not named a successor as of December 6, 2021.
Companies are grouped by year of leadership change and ordered categorically by size and then alphabetically by name.
A version of this Data Byte was also published as the Appendix in DDP’s Global Ballet Leadership Report. To learn more about the data and report methodology, view the Global Ballet Leadership Report.
This Report expands the scope of Dance Data Project®’s research to examine, for the first time, the largest U.S. contemporary and modern dance companies. Past research by Dance Data Project® (DDP) has examined various aspects of the dance industry with a lens of gender equity, including leadership and programming at the largest ballet companies, dance festivals, venues presenting dance, and more. This is DDP’s first study which explicitly looks at contemporary and modern dance companies.
The Report finds that the Largest 50 U.S. contemporary and modern dance companies operated with aggregate expenses of about $150 million in fiscal year 2019. For context, in the same year, the Largest 50 U.S. ballet companies operated with aggregate expenses of about $664 million, showing an extreme disparity in available resources.
The Report also shows the even gender distribution of current Artistic Directors at the Largest 50 U.S. contemporary and modern dance companies (50% women and 50% men), as well as the gender distribution of company founders (54% women and 46% men), and the average age of companies (37 years).
The following Report is Dance Data Project® (DDP)’s third annual Season Overview Report and analyzes the works programmed by the Largest 50 U.S. ballet companies between August 2020 and August 2021, specifically focusing on the gender distribution of choreographers.
DDP found, for the third consecutive year, that the majority of work was choreographed by men. Men choreographed 69% of the works programmed in the 2020-2021 season, a slight decrease from 72% in the previous season and 81% the season before. In comparison, women choreographed 27% of works, and 4% of works were choreographed by co-choreographers of different genders and/or gender non-conforming choreographers.
Encouragingly, programmed works by women have increased by 10% since DDP’s first Season Overview Report, which analyzed the 2018-2019 season.
The Report also analyzes the number of individual choreographers and groups of co-choreographers whose work was programmed in the 2020-2021 season. DDP recorded 447 unique choreographers/groups of co-choreographers, of whom 60% were men. The two choreographers whose work was programmed by the largest number of companies were George Balanchine and Marius Petipa.
Dance Data Project® (DDP) presents Data Byte: Artistic Director History, a mini-report providing a breakdown of the gender distribution in artistic leadership among the 50 companies who comprise DDP’s 2021 Largest 50 US Ballet Companies. The data for the mini-report was sourced from company websites, news articles, and press releases and is the first Report from DDP to examine gender distribution in US ballet companies as far back as company foundings.
The following Report is the third annual Dance Data Project® Artistic and Executive Leadership Report and the most comprehensive study to date. For the 2021 Report, the research team produced two parts. The first, Largest 50 U.S. ballet companies and Scope of the Industry, was published in May 2021. This second Report examines the leadership positions at the Largest 50 and Next 50 U.S. ballet companies and compares the number of men and women in the roles, as well as their respective compensation. The Report goes further to give year-by-year comparisons and further insight into the highest compensated employees at the ballet companies with the largest operating budgets.
Dance Data Project®‘s newest report contains the annual rankings of the Largest 50 U.S. ballet companies and goes further to produce, for the first time, a secondary list of the “Next 50” U.S. ballet companies. The Report gives information on the aggregate expenditures of both groups, demonstrating the considerable scope of the ballet industry as well as the significant disparity in size between the largest few companies and the many smaller ones.
In prior years DDP has produced an annual Artistic & Executive Leadership Report, which has established the Largest 50 sample and utilized it to explore the scope of the ballet industry and equity in leadership. In 2021, due to the expanding size of our dataset, DDP will be producing this research in two parts. This first report encompasses the Largest 50 and scope of industry, and a second report will be issued on leadership.
Connecting the Dots is an ongoing campaign by DDP to advocate for the acknowledgement of the pandemic’s effect on women in the arts by policy makers, journalists, and funding organizations. The campaign features over 60 articles and studies, reflecting the generational set-backs that women across the globe face as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. This Data Byte is a compilation of the most salient facts from the campaign, available for download and easy to read and share.
DDP’s annual Global Resident Choreographer Survey comes in the form of a mini-report this year. As always, our team has focused on the gender distribution resident choreographers at leading domestic and international ballet companies. This year, we examined 64 resident choreographer positions at 75 United States and 68 international ballet companies for a total of 143 companies. Want to see the year-to-year comparison? Download our Notes and Limitations document for some additional context and insight.
