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DDP Talks To

"The Devil Ties My Tongue" by Amy Seiwert performed for the SKETCH Series, 2013. Photo by David DeSilva. Courtesy of Amy Seiwert's Imagery

Pacific Northwest Ballet’s New Voices: Choreography and Process for Young Women in Dance

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Pacific Northwest Ballet has created a year-long course dedicated curating female choreography from an early stage in a dancer’s career. New Voices, as it is called, is funded by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation – known to support women in dance – and was first tested as an aspect of PNB’s summer program.

To Pointe Magazine, Artistic Director of PNB Peter Boal had this to say:

“I do post-performance Q&As, and questions I hear so frequently are ‘Why aren’t there more female choreographers?’ or ‘What can we do to ensure there will be more?’ As I think about this issue, I keep going further and further into the pipelines of empowerment, support and opportunity. It was natural for me to think, Oh, I could be a choreographer. And I don’t know if women in classical ballet have felt that.” 

Boal even went on to admit that he does not have enough female choreographers featured in his upcoming season. It is essential for leaders to admit those instances in which they could do better and change their programming in the future to reflect their determination to be more equitable.

Pacific Northwest Ballet founding artistic co-director Francia Russell, directs ballet dancers at the company’s studio in Seattle. Russell retired in 2005.

The New Voices program is a remarkable step in the right direction for this leading company and supports the commitment Boal makes in his discussion with Pointe. As the program unfolds, DDP will follow closely to see the emerging choreographers with a new voice and opportunity. This is just the beginning for creative young women in a leading ballet school.

Read the interview with Boal and report on the initiative in Pointe Magazine.

New York Times: The Place to Challenge Ballet’s Gender Stereotypes? In Daily Class

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25 January 2019

By Madison Mainwaring

In a typical morning class at American Ballet Theater, the brightly lit studio feels like a laboratory. If you’ve watched these dancers in performance, you might be surprised at how messy they can be when practicing, falling out of turns, missing the landing of jumps.

Gabe Stone Shayer, center, with, from left, Mr. Sebastian, Ms. Williams, Ms. Brandt and Mr. Holloway at American Ballet Theater in New York. Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times

On a Friday before “Nutcracker” season, the ballet master Vladilen Semenov remained relatively quiet, explaining a combination before stepping back to watch to the mixed class of men and women. But the dancers had their own agendas, testing their bodies in experiments of strength, flexibility and physics. A handful of the women, instead of going on point, stayed in slippers to try the men’s steps.

Ballet is widely seen as putting women on a pedestal — male dancers literally lift them over their heads — reinforcing conventional ideas about masculinity and femininity. The pas de deux, or romantic male-female duet, is considered by many to be the art form’s linchpin, but it can seem sentimental, or worse, sexist. Can ballet reflect contemporary ideas about gender? This question is crucial in determining its future standing and reception, especially among audience members unfamiliar with its traditions.

Read the full article in the New York Times.

WFPL: In A Remarkable Choreographers Showcase, Louisville Ballet Continues To Innovate

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2 February 2019

By Kathi E.B. Ellis

This year’s Choreographers Showcase — #ChorShow — is a show that’s unlike any other program the Louisville Ballet has produced.

It follows in the tradition of company members, and sometimes guests, creating new pieces of dance. There the similarities fade.

This year’s show is in a non-traditional space; within that space each work is site-specific. Continuing Producing and Artistic Director Robert Curran’s aesthetic of pairing dance with other genres, each of the five ballets in #ChorShow has a different designer, who are drawn from the Kentucky College of Art + Design. KyCAD also provides the venue at their Third Street campus. The short pieces are scheduled multiple times at each performance, meaning that audiences select which piece they see in what order. A food truck and an outside bar add to the casual vibe of the evening.

Sam English/Louisville Ballet
Annie Honebrink in Sanjay Saverimuttu’s “Amid Exes and Whys.”

Guest choreographer Tim Harbour, resident choreographer at the Australian Ballet, is paired with sculptor Matt Weir. Together they explore a future that might be dystopian, and how young people will exist there. Weir’s overhead canopy installation morphs beautifully in Daniel L. Perez’s excellent and evocative lighting design; is it natural, is it a chemical formation post-eco tragedy — either or both could be true at any point.

Read the full article on WFPL’s Arts and Culture Blog.

Penny Saunders on TESTIMONY

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Watch the video below to hear choreographer Penny Saunders talk about her new work for Grand Rapids Ballet, TESTIMONY.

Look out for a Meet the Choreographer soon with Penny and our founder, Liza Yntema.

New York Times: Taking Your Child to Work, When Your Job Is Making Theater

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6 November 2018

By Michael Paulson

There were babies at Studio 54.

That’s not a reference to actors dissatisfied with their dressing rooms or patrons griping about their seats.

It’s just that the play now being performed here — a journalism comedy, starring Daniel Radcliffe, Cherry Jones and Bobby Cannavale, called “The Lifespan of a Fact” — is the first on Broadway with an all-female design team. Most of them have children. And several of those children are very young.

Theater organizations are experimenting with programs to help women with children, like the projection designer Lucy Mackinnon (with her son Oscar), juggle careers and motherhood. Julieta Cervantes for The New York Times.

So when Leigh Silverman, the director of the play, was putting together her team, she asked what seemed like a straightforward question: What would the new mothers among her designers need to manage the long hours required for preparing a new stage production?

The question of how well — or poorly — the theater world accommodates child care has been talked about for years, and is closely bound up with the discussion of why women are so underrepresented as writers, directors, and designers at the industry’s highest, and highest-paying, levels. Of the 20 nonmusical playsannounced for Broadway thus far this season, just three — including “Lifespan” — are directed by women.

Read the full article in the New York Times.

New York Times: The Fight for Gender Equality in One of the Most Dangerous Sports on Earth

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7 February 2019

By Daniel Duane

Paige Alms surfing at Maverick’s in December. Dina Litovsky/Redux, for The New York Times

Read two excerpts from the article:

It was already afternoon when Valenti decided she had to get in the water. She felt a burden to prove that female big-wave surfers can keep up with men — more so because she helped found, in 2016, the Committee for Equity in Women’s Surfing, an activist group that started with the modest ambition of getting women invited to big-wave contests, from which they had always been excluded, and grew unexpectedly into a reckoning for the global sport of competitive surfing.

…Like most female surfers of her generation, Valenti grew up unaware that women even rode big waves. She learned to surf at age 7 in Dana Point, Calif., in Orange County. In third grade, she wrote an essay about her dream of becoming a professional and surfing the powerful Banzai Pipeline on the North Shore of Oahu. Valenti excelled in youth contests and, like many girl surfers, idolized Kennelly — a top pro at the time, equaling the best men at displays of fearless aggression and technical mastery in dangerous surf. When Valenti was in her early teens, she signed modest endorsement deals with surfwear companies. She subscribed to every surf magazine but found them boring because they featured action shots of only boys and men, with girls strictly on the beach in bikinis. Valenti’s frustration deepened when she became convinced that her sponsors paid more to girls who looked like models, even if Valenti outsurfed them. When she protested, she lost her endorsement contracts.

Read the full article in the New York Times.

Crosscut: Teen choreographers hope to break ballet’s glass ceiling

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7 February 2019

By Brangien Davis

Ballet students engage in a movement study about focus in a choreography class taught by Eva Stone at Pacific Northwest Ballet on Feb. 6, 2019. Called “New Voices: Choreography and Process for Young Women in Dance,” it’s PNB’s first-ever, year-long program aimed at increasing the numbers of women who choreograph ballet. (Photo by Dorothy Edwards/Crosscut)


On a chilly Wednesday night in Seattle, a group of young dancers is planting seeds of revolution.

The girls — all 14 to 16 years old — are flocked on the floor of a Pacific Northwest Ballet rehearsal studio, chatting nervously while parents file into the viewing area. As advanced-intermediateLevel VII students enrolled in PNB School, these young women have been in dance recitals before, but this one is different. This time, they’ve written the choreography themselves.

“Ballet is woman,” said legendary choreographer George Balanchine. He had a point, except when it comes to the choreography.

While modern dance has long drawn female choreographers, contemporary ballet remains largely created by men. The women who tend to pop up on seasonal ballet lineups — Twyla Tharp, Jessica Lang, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa — are exceptions to a norm that has existed since approximately the Renaissance. (PNB’s 2018-2019 season includes 13 male choreographers and justone woman, Robin Mineko Williams, on the Director’s Choice mixed bill.)

In an effort to help right this disparity, PNB School Director Peter Boal has said he is currently working to “rectify an imbalance that exists in ballet.” This fall, PNB launched a program that aims to dig toward the root of the problem by encouraging women to consider choreography as early as young teens.

Read the full article on Crosscut.

Penny Saunders at Grand Rapids Ballet

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DDP Founder Liza Yntema and Penny Saunders with dancers from Saunders' upcoming work entitled Testimony.

DDP is excited to share highlights of some of Penny Saunders‘ upcoming work as Resident Choreographer at Grand Rapids Ballet, under the leadership of Artistic Director James Sofranko. Her new piece is entitled TESTIMONY, and DDP founder Liza Yntema was one of the early few to have the pleasure of watching the work in the studios of Grand Rapids Ballet.

See more videos from the work below:

An interview with Saunders by Yntema will be featured soon on our website as the first in the “Meet the Choreographer” series.

Upcoming Panel from Eugene Ballet Music Director: #MeToo

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The image accompanying the University of Oregon’s announcement of the panel. A male dancer is clad in a tutu, his foot locked in chains.

Oregon Artswatch shared a preview of a panel in April led by Brian McWhorter, the Eugene Ballet Music Director. Typically, DDP praises such panels as noble opportunities to analyze topics of inequity and the bizarre narratives that we accept as the norm in ballet. The upcoming panel, hosted by the University of Oregon, however, selected an image of a tutu-clad man in chains for its thumbnail and headlining poster. The content of “Ballet Outsider” seems appropriate and wide-ranging, but this image is grossly inappropriate and makes a joke out of the very real topics and challenges headlining this event. The gender held back by chains in this art is certainly not male. Read the event description below:

Inspired by the #MeToo movement, challenges to age-old ballet narratives, and questions surrounding race, gender roles, sexism, equality, eating disorders, and abuse in ballet, Eugene Ballet Music Director Brian McWhorter hosts a panel discussion exploring the state of ballet prior to the Eugene Ballet’s production of Romeo and Juliet. (The event is part of the ongoing Ballet Outsider series). Guest speakers include Lara Bovilsky, an associate professor of English at the University of Oregon whose work focuses on early modern British understandings of group and individual identity; Jamie Friedman, an assistant professor of English at Linfield College, who specializes in identity politics in 14th-century English literature; and Shannon Mockli, a University of Oregon associate professor of dance and choreographer known for provocative, individualistic work.

The next Ballet Outsider panel takes place at noon April 10. It will feature Eugene Ballet resident choreographer Suzanne Haag, who is choreographing an updated version of The Firebird that puts the story in a contemporary context.

Access the announcement of the panel here. Read about the panel in Oregon Artswatch.

Amy Seiwert Featured in the Sacramento News & Review

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By Isabelle Vail

1 February 2019

Amy Seiwert is well-known to the DDP team as one of the leaders supporting women in dance and equity in the arts. She will be interviewed this week by DDP founder Liza Yntema during a stop on her Listening Tour to Smuin Ballet, where Seiwert is choreographing a world premiere on the company.

In the Sacramento News & Review, Seiwert’s work for Sacramento Ballet, of which she is Artistic Director, is described as invigorating. Tessa Marguerite Outland writes:

Tchaikovsky’s overture floats out of the orchestra pit, and children dash across a dimly lit stage. The scene is set, and the audience waits for Clara, a young girl with bouncing curls, to appear and receive her Christmas gift.

But this time, it’s Marie who twirls in to accept the nutcracker. Unlike Clara, she’s growing out of dolls and into womanhood, though the gentle girl still dreams of lands with sugar plum fairies, Arabian dancers and a toy prince.

In December, The Sacramento Ballet debuted a different version of The Nutcracker, this time under the leadership of a new artistic director, Amy Seiwert. Seiwert admitted that creating her own version was terrifying; looming over the production was the shadow of a beloved 30-year-old legacy, cast by her predecessors and former teachers Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda.

Read the full feature in the Sacramento News & Review.

Look out for Yntema’s interview with Seiwert soon on our blog!