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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

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.

New York Times: #SpeakingInDance Hats Off to Ballet Hispánico’s Women

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By Gia Kourlas

27 March 2019

For the series #SpeakingInDance for The New York Times, Ballet Hispanico’s work with Annabelle Lopez Ochoa was shot on video. According to The Times, the piece was “created for male dancers,” and will be performed by women for the first time in NYC at the Joyce Theater on March 26. Sombrerísimo, Ochoa’s piece, is set to music by Titus Tiel. Read more about the company’s empowering take on the work in The Times.

Watch the video on The New York Times’ website or Instagram.

Stylist: Why the English National Ballet’s new season is the most feminist ballet yet

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By Elena Chabo

The English National Ballet’s new season is en pointe when it comes to amplifying female voices.

Dance may seem like an industry dominated by women, but female choreographers are still a minority. This April, the English National Ballet has leapt on the issue, presenting She Persisted, a programme celebrating women in all aspects of dance.

“The classical ballet world needs more women’s perceptions on female characters in narrative dance,” says choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, whose work Broken Wings, based on the life of Frida Kahlo, is one of three that make up She Persisted. 

Read the full article in Stylist.

Boston Ballet ChoreograpHER Initiative Updates

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Boston Ballet’s ChoreograpHER initiative continues to develop. The program establishes a platform for female dance students and professional dancers to develop choreographic skills and for Boston Ballet to invest in new, innovative works by female artists. One of the few of its kind, the initiative will support women beyond 2019, as it is designed to be a multi-year endeavor for the company and its affiliate school.

Boston Ballet has recently shared the ways in which the program is progressing and giving women new opportunities:

  • The inaugural Student Choreographic Project performance took place in February and featured original choreography from ten female student choreographers. The Student Choreographic Project aims to discover and nurture future choreographers by creating and presenting a piece with their peers to a live audience.
  • On May 22, Principal Dancer Lia Cirio is debuting a premiere at the 10th Anniversary of the Next Generation program with music by Anna Stromer. Lia was one of the six dancer-choreographers featured at BB@home:ChoreograpHER this past November, so this commissioned ballet is a next step in her choreographic development, bringing her artistry to a larger stage for a larger audience. Next Generation will also feature choreography by two female faculty members. 
  • The 2019–2020 Boston Ballet season will feature Helen Pickett’s Petal as a company premiere, as well as a return of Tsukiyo.

Learn more about the initiative here.

Laurent Liotardo/The English National Ballet

Broadway World: Choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa Receives Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award

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20 March 2019

Jacob’s Pillow announces that internationally sought-after Colombian-Belgian choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa is the recipient of the 2019 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. With a career that spans over 15 years, Lopez Ochoa has created over 90 works for more than 50 major dance companies around the world-bridging different countries, genres, and reputations with a fluency that is unmatched. Lopez Ochoa will accept the award as part of Jacob’s Pillow Season Opening Gala on June 15. Ochoa joins a list of honorees that include Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, Bill T. Jones, Merce Cunningham, Kyle Abraham, Michelle Dorrance, Camille A. Brown, Liz Lerman, and Faye Driscoll, among others.

“Annabelle Lopez Ochoa is a versatile and prolific choreographer who has created signature works for companies around the world. A global citizen, she creates rigorous works of great beauty and intensity in hybrid contemporary and classical ballet vocabularies that enable dancers to truly realize themselves. Ochoa demands that dancers are deeply and unabashedly present, and because of this, the audience cannot help but be drawn to them. We honor her many achievements while investing in the work she has yet to create,” says Jacob’s Pillow Director Pamela Tatge.

Read the full article on Broadway World.

New York Times: Dance Luminaries Weigh in on the Conspicuous Absence of Female Choreographers

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Written by Gia Kourlas for The New York Times on June 23rd, 2016, this article highlights what leaders in the community thought of the inequity in ballet at the time. Notably interviewed and defensive of the field was Peter Martins, who left New York City Ballet last year following accusations of assault, leading the company into a year of scandal. “’Listen, I’ve lived in a women’s world my whole life,’ said Peter Martins, the ballet master in chief of New York City Ballet. ‘The last thing we are is sexist here.’ At the same time, the lack of female choreographers is glaringly obvious at City Ballet and other major ballet companies.”

Today, New York City Ballet has hired new leadership (including a woman as associate artistic director – Wendy Whelan). What would the comments be for the same article today, and who would weight in?

Read the article in The New York Times.

The Conversation: A half-century before the hashtag, artists were on the front lines of #MeToo

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By Vivien G. Fryd

19 March 2019

The #MeToo movement has had a sweeping effect on politics, organized religion, educational institutions, Hollywood, sports and the military.

The cultural prominence of rape and sexual assault might be new. Efforts to bring attention to the issue, however, are not.

Beginning in the 1970s, a group of female artists in the U.S. started confronting rape, incest and sexual assault through performances, videos, quilts and other nontraditional media.

By tackling a taboo subject, they were at the forefront of raising public awareness of these issues. In my new book “Against Our Will: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970,” I detail how their relentless efforts to end the silence surrounding sexual violence against women reverberates in the #MeToo movement today.

The ‘heroic’ rapes of the Renaissance

When these feminist artists emerged, they sought to counter what art historians call “the heroic rape tradition of Western art.”

Beginning in the Renaissance, this tradition involved artists’ rendering assault, rape and murder against women with a patina of beauty and heroism that masked the reality of the violence.

Read the full article on The Conversation.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Florentine Opera’s new leader says every group should be thinking about #MeToo issues

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By Jim Higgins

19 March 2019

As the new general director and CEO of the Florentine Opera, Maggey Oplinger leads a local performing arts organization with a long history, but one that’s also recovering from a #MeToo disruption. 

Her plan for the future includes “creating a culture where there is zero tolerance for that kind of behavior and where there is a safe buffer zone” for staff and performers to report any allegations, Oplinger said. 

Oplinger, who began work March 1, succeeds William Florescu, who resigned abruptly in May 2018. The Florentine board later disclosed that Florescu’s departure was related to “violation of the Florentine Opera’s policies and prohibitions concerning sexual misconduct.” A Washington Post report on sexual harassment in the classical music world included a 2008 incident involving Florescu.

In that incident, the Post reported, the singer felt she had no one she could complain to about the leader of the company. 

Drawing on her experience working for Johnson Controls, Oplinger said she will ensure people have multiple channels for reporting transgressions. For example, Johnson Controls made it possible for an employee to report inappropriate contact to any superior staff member the employee felt comfortable with, she said.

The Florentine’s board of directors has a new human resources committee; a leader of that committee will visit with staff regularly, providing another safe outlet for reporting. That committee is also updating the Florentine’s HR policies.

“I think the logistics of how to handle #MeToo are almost more complex than the policies in some way,” Oplinger said, noting that she wouldn’t want to send a person who has just come forward with an allegation back into rehearsal with a person they’ve accused.

Read the full article in the Journal Sentinel.

BBC News: Sir David Hare: Society shifting women’s role in film and theatre

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18 March 2019

Women are seeing better representation in film and theatre, Sir David Hare has said, but the change is due to societal pressure rather than the industry.

The acclaimed playwright and director said there were more stories being told about women but the number of women behind the camera was “still tiny”.

The industry was “running along behind” society, he said.

Sir David, known for creating leading roles for women, wrote screenplays for The Hours, The Reader and Collateral.

“I’ve been going on about women’s lives and about the importance of portraying women’s lives for 45 years now and nobody listened for the first 45 years,” he said.

“And at last, people are listening.

“Now I don’t think that’s a change in the industry, I think that’s a change in society.”

The US campaign group, Time’s Up, says only 4% of Hollywood’s biggest earning films from the past decade were directed by women.

Speaking in February, British director Georgia Parris said it was a “pretty depressing figure” and part of the “age-old problem that women are hired on experience and men are hired on potential”.

A movement, known as the #4percentchallenge, is now trying to inspire confidence in future movie-makers and Time’s Up is asking actors to commit to working with a female director in the next 12 months.

In the UK, the percentage of women being cast in UK films (around 25%) has barely changed in more than 100 years, data released by the British Film Institute (BFI) in 2017 showed.

However, the percentage of female crew members went up from 3% to 33% over the same period of time.

Read the full article on BBC News.

If Theater Can Change, So Can Ballet: New York Times – ‘Doors Swing Open for Women and People of Color at Top Ranks of American Theater’

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By Michael Paulson

19 March 2019

To understand the striking transformation taking place in the American theater, consider Nataki Garrett.

Ms. Garrett, a stage director who has held leadership posts in California and Colorado, is an African-American woman with a track record of championing new work. On Tuesday, she is being named the sixth artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, a Tony-winning nonprofit with a $44 million budget and an annual audience of 400,000.

Across the country, scores of artistic directors, most of them white men who have served as community tastemakers for years, are leaving their jobs via retirements, ousters, and an industrywide round of musical chairs. As their successors are appointed, a shift is underway: according to a national survey conducted by two Bay Area directors, women have been named to 41 percent of the 85 jobs filled since 2015, and people of color have been named to 26 percent.

Read the full article in The New York Times.