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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

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.

Broadway World: Ergo Arts Theatre Announces 2nd Annual ERGO PINK FEST

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18 March 2019

Ergo Pink Fest is a 4-day theatre festival in Toronto (March 28-31, 2019), conceived and hosted by Ergo Arts Theatre (EAT) that gives voice to female and non-binary identified playwrights, providing them a unique platform to develop and showcase their work. The festival, being held at the Small World Music Centre, 180 Shaw Street, brings together award-winning playwrights and dramaturges Beverley Cooper, Marcia Johnson, Anita La Selva, Paula Wing and Elyne Quan to nurture the development of eight new plays.

The plays take us around the world – China, Poland, Italy and America – and talk of the experience of female, non-binary identifying and transgender characters.

“The original idea behind the festival came when we read the 2015 Equity in Theatre study by the Playwrights Guild of Canada,” says EAT Artistic Director, Anna Pappas. “It said that the greatest disparity in gender equity happens in the playwright category. So that seemed to be the place to start, providing a space for these playwrights to create that work and tell those stories. The experience last year was so powerful and made such a positive impact, that a second year was inevitable. To know that 8 new plays will be brought into the Canadian theatre scene as a result of this work is very exciting.”

Read the full article on Broadway World.

Women’s Programming Should Be As Diverse As Men’s

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South East Dance has announced recent programming to challenge pervasive and systematic inequity in the UK dance scene.

According to UK’s Broadway World’s News Desk, the program, 20:20 Vision, “will feature 20 unique performances from 20 choreographers and producers, all of whom identify as women or non-binary artists.”

The programming is non-classical and certainly defies the norms of productions often commissioned at the Royal Opera House and Sadler’s Wells theatre. An aerial dance company, Gravity & Levity, will perform, according to Broadway World, along with choreographers such as Janine Harrington, a dance artist whose work explores movement and technology.

The program has a significant purpose: to highlight the gender-imbalance and “challenge the status quo and perceptions of what dance is, who makes it, what it can achieve and who it’s for.” But the program also highlights an additional issue we must tackle as a community. When a work diverges too far from classical ballet, or the modern forms of the art, choreographers risk their work falling under an identification that may never be accepted by ballet audiences.

20:20 Vision is exciting and places women in the spotlight – where they should be – but to expect works that diverge so drastically from even the most experimental works the Royal Ballet could perform (think productions like Divergence by Crystal Pite or even Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice in Wonderland) gives such companies basis to ignore urges to program women.

A work that could be identified as “out there” or “extreme” is highly specialized. Ballet and the programming selected for classical/neoclassical companies are specific to those trained in balletic technique and audiences seeking a more identifiable combination of technique, story, and music. Deviating forms of dance, like aerial and even the less-abstract work of Harrington, which can combine several mediums and abstract ideas, do not fall into the same target audiences of a classical ballet company like the Royal Ballet. Sadler’s Wells can perhaps tackle the more experimental programming, as it is no longer associated with only classical ballet, but these major main stages require large-scale productions that capture at least one of the elements a classical ballet audience seeks.

Women’s programming is too often solely associated with experimental productions like those featured in 20:20 Vision. Just like the repertoire we see in men’s programming, women’s programming can and should cover a wider range of works and styles.

Read about 20:20 Vision here.

Courtesy of Cheryl Mann via Daily Nexus

Daily Nexus Article, “The Joffrey Presents Not Your Grandma’s Ballet” Covers #MeToo Discussion

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By Hannah Jackson

12 March 2019

For UCSB’s Daily Nexus, Hannah Jackson reviewed the Joffrey Ballet’s Not Your Grandma’s Ballet performance. Hannah Jackson applauded the company’s discussion of #MeToo in ballet and discussed portrayals of women in Alexander Eckman’s “show-stopping” Joy. She wrote:

Following the performance, artistic director of the Joffrey Ashley Wheater spoke onstage with Professor Christopher Pilafian from the Department of Theater and Dance. In spite of the numerous scandals that have recently struck the dance world in conjunction with the #MeToo movement, Wheater believes that “dance is having a moment right now.” It was evident that while ballet still very much tailored to an older, wealthier audience, the Joffrey is leading the charge toward a more progressive and accepting future for the art form: starting with bodies.

“Robert Joffrey said, ‘A great dancer comes in every shape and size,’ and I believe that is true if you look at our company today,” Wheater said. And he’s right: throughout the performance I was pleasantly surprised by the (relative) diversity; the presence of breasts and strong thighs more common than that of alarming skinniness.

While acceptance of the human form as it comes seems like a small step, seeing attainable body standards on the stage of one of the world’s most renowned companies is no small feat. This permissiveness, in conjunction with the Joffrey’s confidence to embrace the funk and the spunk of experimental dance will lead them into the 21st century — now it’s time for a young audience to follow in suit.   

Read the full article here.