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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

Dance Magazine: Why Every Dancer Should Choreograph At Least Once, According to Boston Conservatory at Berklee

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5 april 2019

The way we create and consume dance is changing every day. Now more than ever, the field demands that dancers not only be able to perform at the highest level, but also collaborate with choreographers to bring their artistic visions to life. Dancers who miss out on choreographic training may very well find themselves at a disadvantage as they try to launch their careers.

At Boston Conservatory at Berklee—which was just named a top school for aspiring choreographers by College Magazine—choreography courses are an essential aspect of the curriculum. “The skills you learn choreographing make you a better artist all-around, and help you build a diverse portfolio,” says dean of dance Tommy Neblett. “Not to mention these skills are transferable to so many different areas within and beyond the performing arts.”

Here’s why Neblett recommends all dance students try choreography at least once:

1. You’ll have a huge professional advantage.

Read the rest in Dance Magazine.

Laurent Liotardo/The English National Ballet

What a Difference a Female Director Can Make! Vogue: #MeToo Finally Makes Waves In The Ballet World With English National Ballet’s She Persisted

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By Alyson Lowe

6 April 2019

Conjure up an image of classical ballet, and pointe shoes, tutus, a corps of fluttering ballerinas and exaggerated stage make-up will spring to mind. Visually, women are everywhere in ballet, but, this is very often where it stops; they are seen as objects of beauty, but historically it has rarely been anything more. Feminist discourse in the art form is only at its very fledgling stage, with women’s voices in the classical realm remaining especially silent.

Led by creative director (and ballerina) Tamara Rojo, the English National Ballet’s latest trilogy, She Persisted, gives those voices to these previously seen-but-not-heard women – and they’re big, bold, loud ones. A trilogy of works, all crafted by female choreographers, the production takes over London’s Sadler’s Wells for two weeks. This isn’t the first time Rojo has led a women-first project. Back in 2016, She Said similarly showcased female choreography, but it’s season two that proves Rojo is very serious about permanent change after #MeToo’s impact through the arts world.

Read the full article in Bhttps://www.vogue.co.uk/article/she-persisted-english-national-balletritish Vogue.

Bloomberg: Tech Giants Are Not Fixing Their U.K. Gender Pay Gap Problem

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By Nate Lanxon

4 April 2019

One year after U.K.-based businesses were forced to report their gender pay gap, there has been some change from tech companies, but not all of it in the right direction.

Facebook Inc. is now paying female staff less on average, but has hired more women in senior positions. Amazon.com Inc., which still employs about the same number of men and women in top jobs, has improved the gap in average pay, while Uber Technologies Inc. and WeWork Cos both revealed a sizable pay gaps.

In April 2018, employers with 250 or more staff in the U.K. were required for the first time to publish data on their gender pay gaps, including the mean and median difference in average hourly wages, bonuses, and what percentage of each pay quartile goes to women.

There were a couple of notable new entries into the report. Uber, which now employs enough people to make its gender pay gap reporting mandatory, revealed it pays women 8.9 percent less than men, and women occupy 32.9 percent of top jobs at the ride-hailing firm.

Read the full article in Bloomberg News.

DC Metro: Review: ‘New York City Ballet: Works by Balanchine, Robbins, and Reisen’ at the Kennedy Center

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By Ramona Harper

3 April 2019

Spring is in the air with not only the blooming cherry blossoms but also the bursting energy of the New York City Ballet’s exciting spring concert at the Kennedy Center.

Something old and something new was the theme of the evening. One might have thought the company’s selections would have presented its founding ballet masters and choreographers, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, first. It didn’t. Ever forward-looking, New York City Ballet opened with Composer’s Holiday, the choreography of a new rising star, 19-year-old Gianna Reisen, the youngest person ever to choreograph a work for the New York City Ballet.

Composer’s Holiday felt perfectly right for a springtime concert with its light, airy, and youthful pulsations and a feeling of excitement and anticipation.

Lukas Foss’s Three American Pieces for violin and piano, performed by Arturo Delmoni and Susan Waters, respectively, was an evocatively moving musical complement that gracefully framed the dancers’ quick, bouncy steps and joyous movements. The female dancers’ sheer white skirted costumes by Virgil Abloh of Off White added a sense of an incredible lightness of being.

Read the full article in DC Metro.

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.

Medium: What We Get Wrong When We Talk About Equal Pay Day

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By Amy Guth

2 April, 2019

Equal Pay Day, the day into the new year the average woman must work to equal what the average white man earned in the previous year, is, let’s be clear, fundamentally a good thing. But, we’re overlooking a key point when we talk about how to eradicate the wage gap.

For each dollar earned by the average white, male worker, white women are paid about 79 cents. The data around pay inequity for women of color is even bleaker: while for every dollar the average white man is paid, and his white, female counterpart is paid about 79 cents, this number drops significantly into the 62–54 cents per dollar range for Black and Latina women.

And often, when we talk about solutions to this inexcusable state, the main narrative quickly turns to negotiation. The AAUW website, for example, does a fine job of showing data points across gender, race and education, yet, there at the bottom of their robust data layout: a prompt to teach us how to negotiate.

Let us be clear, negotiation is not the issue. As a woman who works in print, online and broadcast journalism and filmmaking, has led a newsroom, runs a business, and serves as president of the Association for Women Journalists Chicago, I’ve been on both sides of negotiation tables in my career. And, anecdotally, I can tell you that there are as many powerful female negotiators as there are male, and just as many lousy ones.

Read the full article on Medium.

New York Times: Womansplaining the Pay Gap

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By Maya Salam

2 April, 2019

If I had a nickel for every time someone told me, “The gender pay gap is a myth,” I may have made back the income I’ve lost over the years for being a woman.

It’s not a myth. And yet the nuance required to explain what perpetuates these misconceptions is not the stuff made for 280-character sound bites on social media, where sweeping dismissals (Men work longer hours! Men pick higher-paying careers!) can quickly snowball.

Today is Equal Pay Day – created in 1996 by the National Committee on Pay Equity, a coalition of women’s, civil rights and labor groups, to draw attention to the gender pay disparities in the United States. The day marks about how long into 2019 American women would have to work to earn what their male counterparts already earned last year. (Though race factors into this as well. More on that below.)

I asked Jessica Bennett, The Times’s gender editor and author of the book “Feminist Fight Club,” to demystify some commonly misunderstood aspects of the pay gap. Here’s what she said.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

BBC News: Muses no more: Ballet’s newest choreographers

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BBC News highlights Boston Ballet principal Lia Cirio’s work from ChoreograpHER in a recent feature. The company is leading the way with its ChoreograpHER initiative and Cirio’s talent is not going unnoticed. We’re proud to see a woman’s hard work getting recognized so soon after her choreographic debut!

See the video on BBC News.

(Video by Hannah Long-Higgins)

Wallpaper: Dior designs costumes for Philip Glass-composed ballet in Rome

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By Laura Hawkins

“Dance in all its forms and variations is a very important frame of reference for me; it fascinates and inspires me, because it gives the body and its possibilities a central role,’” explains Dior artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri.

Dance has long had associations with the French maison. In 1955, Christian Dior designed the wedding dress of Royal Ballet star Margot Fonteyn, and his autobiography abounds with metaphors comparing the rhythm behind and performance of showcasing a collection as a ‘ballet’. 

Dior’s S/S 2019, featured in the Dior Magazine. Photography: Ken Browar

For her S/S 2019 collection, Chiuri celebrated the power, femininity and strength of the pioneering female dancers Isadora Duncan and Loïe Fuller, with a featherlight and ethereal offering of gauzy dresses in nude tones, pleated tulle skirts and ballet pumps. Her accompanying runway show featured a collaboration with choreographer Sharon Eyal. ‘Dance in all its forms allows me to explore the body and its performances in a way that is harmonious and beautiful, even unconventional.’

On Thursday 29 March, Dior’s couture-meets-costume design credentials took centre stage, when the designer debuted her creations for Nuit Blanche, a ballet dedicated to the composer and musician Philip Glass, performed at the the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma.

Read the full article in Wallpaper.

The Reviews Hub: Northern Ballet: Victoria – Sadler’s Wells, London

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By Maryam PhilpottC

2019 marks the bicentenary of Queen Victoria’s birth, a monarch who, along with both Elizabeths, secured her place in history by reining unchallenged for decades and presiding over a golden age of technical, societal and cultural innovation. Yet for modern storytellers, it is her personal grief that fascinates, living most of her life in widows’ weeds mourning the death of her beloved Albert, which Cathy Marston has now turned into a full-length ballet, Victoria, arriving at Sadler’s Wells for its London premiere.

Read the full article in The Reviews Hub.