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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

Playbill: Dance Theatre of Harlem Celebrates Its 50th Anniversary at New York City Center

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For an April 11 article in Playbill, Djassi Dacosta Johnson celebrates the Dance Theatre of Harlem’s 50th anniversary at New York City Center. Johnson highlights the company’s foundation of inclusion and awareness, calling it “the proliferation of classical ballet- artistically and socially advancing what ballet can mean to a public.”

Johnson praised Virginia Johnson, DTH’s director, writing, “She has provided a platform for female classical ballet choreographers through Women Who Move Us, the DTH program with a mission to cultivate the female choreographic voice in classical ballet. ‘There is much headway to be made,’ says Johnson. ‘The ballet world is so hierarchical and still so traditionally male dominant.'”

The company began with a strong advocate for a well-rounded, diverse, rooted-in-classical but thoroughly modern ballet, and 50 years later, this philosophy continues to allow DTH to thrive.

Read Johnson’s article here.

ThinkProgress: Muffet McGraw is done hiring men

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By Lindsay Gibbs

30 March 2019

SOUTH BEND, INDIANA — Muffet McGraw will never forget the first time she called a timeout.

It was 1977. Her team, St. Joseph’s, was playing in a big tournament game. They’d just given up six unanswered points, the players were blowing assignments, missing shots, not even trying to grab rebounds. Something had to be done.

So, McGraw — then Muffet O’Brien — got the referee’s attention and called for play to stop.

The only problem? She was just a player at the time.

Her coach was not impressed with his point guard’s initiative. “He was livid,” McGraw recalled, laughing hysterically as she thinks back to her coach’s exasperated reaction. “I was like, I thought we needed it!”

McGraw, now the head coach of Notre Dame’s women’s basketball team, no longer gets questioned about her timeout choices — not with two national championships and 920 career wins to her name. Now, when McGraw tells you to huddle up, no one second-guesses her.

Read the full article on ThinkProgress.

Major Highlights

When Title IX was enacted in 1972, 90 percent of the coaches of women’s college sports were women. These days, it’s about 41.5 percent. The numbers are slightly better for women’s basketball, the most popular women’s collegiate sport. Last year, 59.3 percent of women’s college basketball teams were coached by women, down from 79.4 percent in 1977.

The number of women coaching in men’s college sports has remained below 3.5 percent since before Title IX. Currently, there is only one female assistant coach in all of NCAA men’s college basketball — Edniesha Curry of the University of Maine.

Altogether, women only hold one out of every 4.5 head coaching jobs in collegiate athletics. And that’s at a time when there are more girls playing sports than ever before.

There are only three out lesbian female coaches in all of Division I women’s basketball: Stephanie White at Vanderbilt, Colleen Mullen at the University of Albany, and Allison Guth at Yale.

In 2016, the Reveal Center for Investigative Reporting reported on the trend of Title IX retaliation lawsuits, noting that from 2006 to 2016, at least 29 female coaches and eight female sports administrators have filed retaliation lawsuits against their universities.

KQED Arts: Bay Area Dance-Maker Called Up as New York Looks for Next Hot Thing in Ballet

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By Carla Escoda

10 April 2019

“Can hip-hop save ballet?”

It was a question recently asked on BBC Radio by Eric Underwood. The former Royal Ballet soloist was talking with other prominent black dancers about the systemic exclusion of black dancers from the ballet world, and the need to keep the art form relevant. As ballet companies embrace assorted strategies to become more inclusive, perhaps the real question is: can ballet save ballet?

It urgently needs a pipeline of new dance-makers, and platforms that give them the freedom to take risks. As Diana Byer, founder and artistic director of the acclaimed New York Theatre Ballet, and a stalwart champion of new dance-makers, tells me, “It is a constant struggle to find even extremely limited funds to nurture emerging choreographers.” Today, she says, “media drives a specific kind of artist and the texture of the dance scene tends to become one-dimensional.”

In this grim climate, Byer has persisted. Last weekend she chose six rising choreographers to present work at New York’s storied 92nd Street Y. All are current or former dancers with well-known companies (including New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, New York Theatre Ballet, and Oakland Ballet), and all are New York-based—except for Milissa Payne Bradley, who hails from the Bay Area.

It’s unusual for the West Coast to be invited to a New York dance party. New York City likes to think of itself as the world’s dance capital, and every other city in America as “regional.”

Read the full article on KQED Arts.

Los Angeles Times: Actress Sofia Carson receives honors during the Los Angeles Ballet Gala

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By Ellen Olivier

12 April 2019

From onstage at Thursday’s Los Angeles Ballet Gala, honoree Sofia Carson held back tears as she spoke about how her mom took her hand at age 3 and walked her to her first ballet class.

“I don’t remember a moment in my life when I wasn’t madly in love with dance,” said the Disney “Descendants” actress. “So when I was 3 years old and stepped into my very first ballet slippers, in that moment my life changed forever. And as I grew up, my love for dance became deeper and stage became my safe place. It became my happiness, my haven.

“So I promised myself that if ever I was lucky enough to do what I love every day of my life, I would do everything that I could to give that chance to dance to other little girls who didn’t have that beginning.”

Read the full article in The Los Angeles Times.

She Persisted: English National Ballet’s She Persisted Shows Work On and By Women

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Tamara Rojo, a star of classical ballet and leader of the acclaimed English National Ballet, continues to lead her company in the right direction. To great praise, Rojo has incorporated a #MeToo era triple-bill into her company’s season. She Persisted, the production that follows the company’s She Said all-female choreography program from 2016, is a breath of fresh air, telling original stories by women to international audiences.

The program is a three-part evening, with work by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Stina Quagebeur (a First Artists with ENB), and Pina Bausch. Nora, Quagebeur’s first work for the main stage, is the program’s major premiere, which speaks volumes to the support Rojo and her team have for new artists – particularly women.

Broken Wings and The Rite of Spring return to the company’s repertoire, creating a full-circle program of work from both emerging female artists to those well-established in the dance community.

Watch English National Ballet’s video below to hear Tamara Rojo, artists, and Stina Quagebeur discuss the program and women choreographers.

Learn more about She Persisted on the ENB website, here.

Choreographer links:

Stina Quagebeur

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa

Pina Bausch

How is Ballet Like Soccer? – New York Times In Her Words: Abby Wambach’s Leadership Lessons: Be the Wolf

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By Maya Salam

9 April 2019

Abby Wambach has made a career out of pursuing goals. She’s scored 184 of them after all, the most by any soccer player, male or female, in international soccer history. But now, a few years into her retirement, Wambach, who led the United States women’s team to a World Cup championship in 2015, is focused on a new kind of goal: motivating women to become leaders.

“There has never been a more important, urgent time than right now for women to begin to fully lead our own lives,” she told me this week.

In her new book, “Wolfpack,” Wambach, 38, shares lessons she learned from decades of training, failure and triumph on the field. It is based on the commencement speech she gave at Barnard College in New York last year that quickly went viral. “If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing, it would be this: ‘Abby, you were never Little Red Riding Hood; you were always the wolf,’” she told graduates.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

DDP Founder Liza Yntema at American Ballet Theatre

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DDP Founder Liza Yntema paid a visit to American Ballet Theatre last week, meeting again with visionary Executive Director Kara Medoff Barnett . The company’s Women’s Movement is taking off with full support at all levels of the major company. Details will soon follow on our website.

Read more about the Women’s Movement on the ABT website here.

HeraldScotland: ‘Defiantly unorthodox’ – Reviews: Scottish Ballet’s Spring! plus Glengarry Glen Ross

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By Mark Brown

6 April 2019

Scottish Ballet, our national dance company, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Given the breadth of its programming, it is fitting that it should begin its celebrations, not with a classical ballet, but with Spring!, a double bill of defiantly unorthodox choreographies.

The evening begins with the world premiere of Dextera, an intriguing and memorable work by Scottish Ballet artist in residence Sophie Laplane. The choreographer describes the piece as a celebration of creativity, but, it seems clear, it is also commenting, upon current debates around gender inequalities and identities.

This it does with imagination, humour and some disquieting imagery. In contrast to the beauty of music by Mozart, red-gloved men manipulate puppet-like women, some of them with hooks attached to their costumes (all the better to control them).

This rigid, disconcerting gender scheme begins to crack when we see a male figure, attired in the same white dress as the women, being moved around the stage with energetic roughness. Soon, chorus scenes are offering comedic gestures of feminist defiance, leading to a final montage of personal freedom and social harmony.

Read the full article in HeraldScotland.

The Boston Globe: At the theater, furious rebuttals in the age of #MeToo

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By Don Aucoin

4 April 2019

In a recent interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN, author Rebecca Traister pointed to a large, gaping hole in the history books: Namely, that they have habitually minimized the intensity and the effectiveness of women’s anger as a force for social change.

“We’ve never been taught the story or given the view of women’s anger as politically potent,’’ said Traister, whose book “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger’’ was published last fall. “Women’s anger, even when it has existed, has often been covered over by the people telling the story of it.’’

At this moment, though, that story is being forcefully told on stages from Boston to Broadway. The anger of women, and their determination to fight back against the role of systemic misogyny in making them feel undervalued and unsafe in the world, has formed the basis of recent and current productions as different as Lyric Stage Company of Boston’s “The Little Foxes,’’ Sleeping Weazel’s “The Audacity: Women Speak,’’ Flat Earth Theatre’s “Not Medea,’’ Also Known As Theatre’s “Extremities,’’ and the riveting “What the Constitution Means to Me,’’ at New York’s Helen Hayes Theater.

Even generally lighthearted classics like Lerner & Loewe’s “My Fair Lady,’’ George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion’’ (from which “My Fair Lady’’ was adapted), and Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate’’ now resonate differently, having been tweaked by contemporary directors to emphasize the defiance of their incensed female protagonists and the legitimacy of their grievances.

Read the full critic’s notebook in The Boston Globe.

The Telegraph: She Persisted, ENB, Sadler’s Wells, review: an all-guns #MeToo broadside

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By Mark Monahan

5 April 2019

Is it encouraging and emancipating – or patronising and pigeonholing – to showcase “female choreographers”? Either way, there’s no doubt that women are sorely under-represented in the realm of dance-creation, and you could hardly accuse English National Ballet (under dancer-director Tamara Rojo) of not sticking to its guns.

Three years ago, it unveiled She Said, a triple bill of new works by women. Now, also at Sadler’s Wells, it is serving up an even more explicit #MeToo-era broadside, with She Persisted. 

Read the full review in The Telegraph.