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December 31st: New England Presenter Travel Fund, December 31st: Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet Scholarship, December 31st: 24 Seven Dance Convention, December 31st: National Theater Project Presenter Travel Grant, December 31st: Breck Creek Artist-in-Residence Program

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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

New York City Ballet opens new season with world premiere by Lauren Lovette

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Tonight marks the opening of New York City Ballet’s new season, and with it, the second world premiere by NYCB Principal Dancer Lauren Lovette.
Lovette, a principal with the company since 2015, studied ballet at the Cary Ballet Conservatory in Cary, North Carolina, later attending summer courses at the School of American Ballet in the summers of 2004 and 2005. She enrolled at SAB as a full-time student in 2006, and joined the main company in 2010.

Her piece for the Fall Gala, which coincides with New York Fashion Week, pits Lovette and designers  Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim together for a collaboration that’s as much about style as it is dance.

Lovette began choreographing while a student at SAB where she participated in the School’s Choreography Workshops in 2008 and 2009. In the summer of 2010, Lovette also participated in a working session of the New York Choreographic Institute, and her first work for NYCB, For Clara, was created for the 2016 Fall Gala.

New York City Ballet commissions new work from SAB alumna

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Gianna Reisen, a graduate of the School of American Ballet and currently an apprentice with Ballet Semperoper Dresden, is set to stage her first-ever work for New York City Ballet during the company’s annual Fall Gala, making her the  youngest commissioned choreographer in the company’s long history. 
The 18-year-old Reisen began studying at SAB in 2011 and took part in the School’s Student Choreography workshop in 2015.  She staged a new work as part of the New York Choreographic Institute fall session in 2016, at the recommendation of NYCB artistic director Peter Martins.

Reisen’s world premiere for NYCB features six men and six women, danced to Three American Pieces by Lukas Foss. The twelve-minute piece will be performed alongside works by Lauren Lovette, Justin Peck, Troy Schumacher and Martins at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater on Thursday, September 28. 

Needless to say, Reisen’s in good company. 

Dance pioneer Ritha Devi has died

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Ritha Devi, a pioneer of Indian classical dance, has died, according to the New York Times.
Devi was instrumental in reviving the classical Indian technique known as Odissi, which had fallen out of favor in India in the 1940s and 1950s. By the 1960s, Devi helped introduce the form on a wider scale in her native India, and later in the United States.

Devi performed around the world and during tours in the U.S. in the 1970s. On one of those tours, Devi was approached by a professor at New York University, where she taught from 1972 to 1982.

Devi made her U.S. debut at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in 1968, dancing multiple roles in telling the legend of Ahalya, “a story of passion, revenge and redemption revolving around the chaste and beautiful wife of a Hindu sage,” the Times wrote. Devi died on September 12. 

Harris Theater names new president and CEO

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Patricia Barretto — formerly interim President and CEO  of the Harris Theater for Music and Dance — will assume the post on a full-time basis, effective immediately, according to an announcement from the Theater’s Board of Trustees.
Baretto joined the Harris in 2015 as Vice President of Marketing and Communications. In 2016, she took on an expanded role as Executive Vice President of External Affairs, overseeing the marketing, development and community engagement programs.

Under Barretto’s leadership, the Harris has exceeded its sales goals for two consecutive seasons and achieved its highest annual fundraising level in five years, according to a statement from the Harris.  The Harris, now in its 14th year, opens its 2017-2018 Presenting Series on October 12 with Monteverdi 450: L’Orfeo, in part a commemoration of the 450th anniversary since the Venetian composer’s birth.

Barretto was previously Executive Director of Toronto’s Opera Atelier. She was also a panel member of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Toronto Arts Council.

The Harris Theater’s executive leadership team also includes Laura Hanssel, Chief Financial Officer, and Lori Dimun, who was recently appointed Chief Operating Officer; the Harris can count itself as one of the few organizations led solely by female executives. 

Ballet West has a new executive director

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Michael Scolamiero will lead Ballet West as its newest Executive Director, following a six-month international search led by Michael Kaiser, President Emeritus of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. 
Scolamiero was formerly the Executive Director of Pennsylvania Ballet, where he oversaw a $12 million campaign to boost the company’s size and fund new ballets. Most recently, Scolamiero served as Executive Director of Miami City Ballet, one of the nation’s largest ballet companies. During his tenure, the Company set records for contributed revenue, recorded operating surpluses of $2.6 million in two years, and reduced debt by more than $2 million.  

Scolamiero will assume his new post in October, before the annual Ballet West Gala.

Review: At Vail, female choreographers feed the mighty river of dance

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Author: Alastair Macaulay

“Is the sociology of the dance world changing? The last two years have brought many more commissions for female choreographers.

English National Ballet made a splash in 2016 with an entire program of new choreography by women. And this year’s “NOW: Premieres” program at the Vail Dance Festival here was subtitled “Celebrating Women Choreographers.” Does this sound like mere tokenism? It’s worth pointing out that all four of these female dance-makers — Michelle Dorrance (this year’s artist in residence), Lauren Lovette, Claudia Schreier and Pam Tanowitz — have worked at the festival before.”

Read the complete review here

The Dance Data Project: A letter from our founder

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In conversations over the years, one thing has always struck me: women in the workplace. Not just any workplace. I’m speaking specifically about the field of dance.
It might seem strange for people to believe that women are an underrepresented minority in dance. We associate dance companies and organizations as being full of women — whether by virtue of the fact that men are less likely than women to study it at a young age, or because dance so often associates in pop culture as pretty ballerinas leaping into the air.

Looking at the field closely, it stands to reason that dance was, and remains, a male-dominated field. A simple Google search reveals that dozens upon dozens of articles have been written on the subject, whether in matters relating to leadership or choreographic opportunities. Some of the smartest and most talented journalists today have gone to great lengths to document those discrepancies. And more often than not, they have succeeded in identifying an important issue that continuously goes unnoticed.

Over the last couple years, I began to wonder what a more deliberate analysis of such an issue might prove, and whether  data might be a useful tool for informing how people think about dance more broadly. I was certain it could be done in a more analytical, calculated manner, driven by statistics. What we ended up with is the site you’re now visiting: The Dance Data Project.

Like any good resource, the Project aims to inform diversity by providing public information for the benefit of further study. As it stands, our staff is small and working to provide as much comprehensive data as possible, whether through independent research reports (the first of which you’ll see on the site) or through informational snapshots that include updated figures related to residencies, organizational makeup, and repertoires.

It’s a process. Our team is small but dedicated, our resources only now beginning to take shape. This is just a beginning. The Dance Data Project has a long way to go, but we’re very much looking forward to the ride.

-Liza Yntema

Dance Magazine: Can we all please acknowledge ballet’s sexism problem already?

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Author: Courtney Escoyne

“On Friday, The New York Times posted an article to its website titled ‘A Conversation With 3 Choreographers Who Reinvigorated Ballet,’ a joint interview with Justin Peck, Christopher Wheeldon and Alexei Ratmansky. It’s a delightful conversation at first, veering from process to style to musical choices—delightful, that is, until a question about the dearth of female choreographers in classical ballet arose.”

Read the complete article here

The Guardian: Royal Ballet triple bill review – five stars for Crystal Pite

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By Luke Jennings

19 March 2017

The Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite is one of the finest dance-makers on the world stage. Her works address the human condition with fearlessness and compassion, and find light in the darkest night of the soul. Unsurprisingly, Pite is one of the dance world’s most sought-after artists, so it is no small triumph that the Royal Ballet has commissioned a new work from her. Entitled Flight Pattern, the work deals with the plight of refugees and displaced communities. It’s an important piece, and Thursday’s first night was lent added significance by the astonishing and dismaying fact that Pite is the first woman to choreograph for Covent Garden’s main stage this century.

Read the full article in The Guardian.

Huffington Post: Behind the tutus, ballet is a boys’ club. This ballerina wants to fix that.

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Author: Chloe Angyal

The ballerina may be the visual symbol of the art form, but men wield most of the creative control.

“Ballerina Ashley Bouder is crying. She’s standing alone in a rehearsal studio in front of 20 or so dance journalists and several funders of her small self-titled ballet company, and she’s crying. And I’m pretty sure it’s my fault.

She’s just finished showing us a snippet of pas de deux that she choreographed, and that she’ll perform in just over a week’s time with her fellow New York City Ballet principal dancer Andrew Veyette. The entire evening of dancing is devoted to women choreographers and to women composers. In over 15 years of dancing with City Ballet, Bouder tells the assembled crowd, she’s danced works by about 40 choreographers and can count only seven women among them. She can’t name a single woman composer whose music she’s danced to ― not a single one.”

Read the complete article here