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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

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

NY Times: Of women, men and ballet in the 21st Century

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Author: Alastair Macaulay

“Can ballet express a modern view of the sexes? In the Western contemporary world, women and men often hold equal status at work, as leaders, as voters, as breadwinners. This kind of equality, however, is precisely what ballet cannot show.

Instead, it creates an either-or dualism from the difference between man and woman. He does most of the partnering (traditionally, all of it). She rises onto point. When he does the same (seldom), the effect is comic. The foot is a relatively tiny part of the body; yet its significance becomes colossal.

The meanings that flow from ballet are not only about gender. Yet the use of pointwork places the woman on a different level of being.”

Read the complete article here

NY Times: The woman who has transformed English National Ballet

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Author: Roslyn Sulcas

“Artistic director, star ballerina, lobbyist, wrangler, psychologist, spokeswoman. Tamara Rojo, the artistic director of English National Ballet, is one busy woman.

Ms. Rojo, 42, a Spanish-born former Royal Ballet principal dancer, has been in her current job for four years, and she has made a startling difference to English National Ballet — a London touring company of 67 dancers that has no home theater and has struggled for a long time to establish its identity in the shadow of the Royal. On Tuesday, her company began a sold-out run of Akram Khan’s critically praised ‘Giselle’ at Sadler’s Wells. Ms. Rojo commissioned the piece last year, part of her risk-taking approach.

She is also the company’s marquee ballerina (along with a fellow Royal Ballet alum, Alina Cojocaru), somehow managing to keep up her technical form and artistry while acting as a one-woman visionary, manager, cheerleader and glamorous high-profile ad for her organization.

Does she sleep?”

NY Times: Breaking the glass slipper: Where are the female choreographers?

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Author: Michael Cooper

It has become a rarity for ballet companies to present works by women, despite the large number of women in the field and the pioneers of the 20th century.

“’Ballet,’ as the choreographer George Balanchine once said, ‘is Woman.’

But if women are still the symbols of ballet in the popular imagination, chances are it is as ballerinas performing dazzling, demanding steps that were devised for them by men. When it comes to choreography, at least at most major companies, ballet remains overwhelmingly a man’s world.”

Read the complete article here

NY Times: Dance Luminaries weigh in on the conspicuous absence of female choreographers

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Author: Gia Kourlas

“’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.

There is Twyla Tharp, the rare woman to succeed as an important choreographer in the ballet world, but few others. (Ms. Tharp, who prefers to be recognized as a choreographer, not a female one, declined to comment for this article.)

[ More on the underrepresentation of women in ballet choreography ]

People in the dance world have different ideas about the reasons behind the dearth of women in a field where, as Mr. Martins points out, women predominate in number. Certain issues, though, come up again and again.”

Read the complete article here

Huffington Post: Gender inequality in contemporary dance

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Author: Harpreet Kaur

“Gender inequality has long affected artists and the cultural sector, but at a first glance this may not seem so apparent. More women than men study fine art. There are large numbers of female actors, dancers, musicians, arts managers, producers and creatives on the whole. But, in big decision making roles, prize winning works, names hitting the largest stages and recognition, more often than not the winners are men.”

Read the complete article here

Financial Times: Sexism in the dance world

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Producer: Griselda Murray Brown

“Women have long been pioneers in dance, establishing companies and breaking new ground. But the leading choreographers today are men. Where have all the women gone? The FT’s Griselda Murray Brown reports.”

Watch the complete segment here

WendyPerron.com: Are women dancers still discriminated against?

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Author: Wendy Perron

“I co-wrote the article below forty years ago. Since the issue has come up again (actually it never went away) I decided to post it. This diatribe was useful back in 2000 when a group of choreographers called the Gender Project got together to address discrimination against women in dance. Reading this article from 1976, they were appalled at how familiar it sounded.”

Read the complete article here

The Guardian: You’re wrong, Akram. We do need more female choreographers

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Author: Luke Jennings

“The choreographer Akram Khan has said that the number of female choreographers should not be increased ‘for the sake of it’, despite industry concerns that women in dance face much greater obstacles than men. Luke Jennings, the Observer’s dance critic, disagrees with Khan’s analysis.”

Read the complete article here