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
Hyperallergic: The Pandemic’s Impact on Museum Workers’ Mental Health
14 April 2021
By Valentina Di Liscia
It has been over a year since the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a global pandemic, but another health crisis has been silently brewing. Experts are beginning to grasp the virus’s devastating effects on our collective mental well-being, particularly for communities disproportionately impacted — essential workers, low-income populations, and people of color among them.
In the museum field, workers experienced sweeping job loss, salary cuts, and burnout that exacerbated the pandemic’s stressors. A new survey by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) finds that the sector’s workers have suffered “a grave toll on their mental health and wellbeing,” rating the impact at an average of 6.6 out of 10. Though many institutions remained shuttered during peaks in virus cases, half of museum staff reported a heavier workload.
Unsurprisingly, independent consultants, contractors, and freelancers — often hired as educators and other key roles in museums — bore the brunt of financial insecurity. More than half had contracts canceled or indefinitely postponed, struggled to find work, and lost over 50% of their pre-pandemic income on average.
Similarly, nearly two-thirds of part-time staff said they lost a median of $8,000 due to reduced salaries, benefits, or hours. Compared to their full-time colleagues, this group of workers faces greater instability: they are more likely to live paycheck to paycheck and less likely to have enough disposable income to save or spend on leisure.
The survey’s findings also reveal the role of gender and race in these workers’ experiences of pandemic-related mental health factors. Museum staff who identify as women were more likely to report an increase in workload and adverse effects on their schedules, salary, and mental health, and BIPOC respondents experienced more financial stress and fewer financial resources than their white counterparts.
To read the piece, click here. You can access the survey report from the American Alliance of Museums here.
Chicago Reader: Show Them The Money
9 April 2021
By Kerry Reid
Back in 2019, I interviewed Chicago set designer Arnel Sancianco for a short Reader profile. In the course of our discussion, he mentioned that, while creating a sustainable career as a designer is never easy, he felt that his peers in costume design (a profession that tends to have more women in its ranks than other design fields) had a harder road. They frequently work without the benefit of full crews, leaving the designer to do a lot of the hands-on work of making and even sometimes maintaining costumes during a show’s run. And they tended to be paid less overall.
How much less they’re paid has come to light in recent years, thanks to the efforts of organizations like Costume Professionals for Wage Equity (CPWE) and the Chicago-based On Our Team. Elsa Hiltner, one of the founders of the latter, created the anonymous crowd-sourced Theatrical Designer Pay Resource spreadsheet to collect data on who gets paid what and where in American theaters.
When Reader freelancer Sheri Flanders spoke to Hiltner last October, she was celebrating the fact that Theatre Communications Group had agreed to list salaries for all jobs posted in ARTSEARCH, the job search engine run by TCG. Now CPWE and On Our Team have convinced two more major theater publications—Playbill and Broadway World—to require salary ranges to be listed for all industry job postings.
As Flanders noted in her article, “It is common practice for a job seeker to respond to a posting for a seemingly full-time or contract paid position, only to discover upon receiving a ‘job’ offer that the position is unpaid, paid in ‘exposure,’ or paid at a stipend rate that averages out to far less than minimum wage.” In 2018, OffStage Jobs began requiring salary information for listings, and the League of Chicago Theatres soon followed suit.
Genevieve Beller of CPWE and Theresa Ham, one of the cofounders of On Our Team, know that transparency in listings is just part of the battle for wage equity. But even getting that victory on the board took major effort. Beller notes that CPWE “reached out to Playbill with a letter in December of 2019 that over 800 people had signed. And we sent that letter to the editor in chief at the time, who is no longer with them, as well as every member of their board that we could find information for. So we received zero response. Which is pretty much par for the course.
To read the full article, click here.
The Washington Post: Ballet directors talk about ‘fitness.’ That’s still code for rail-thin dancers.
07 April 2021
By Chloe Angyal
Today’s ballet teachers and company directors know that they can no longer simply instruct their dancers to lose weight. But that doesn’t mean they’ve relinquished their rigid, narrow vision of what a “good” ballet body looks like: They simply swathe that ideal in the gauzy, feel-good messaging of today’s fitness culture.
For decades, the prevailing attitude was to lose the weight, no matter how, says Harrison: “Lose it by ‘Nutcracker’ — and by the way it’s November 15 — and [do it] without getting injured and without passing out.” In her infamous memoir “Dancing on My Grave,” New York City Ballet principal dancer Gelsey Kirkland recounts an incident in the late 1960s when the company’s co-founder and de facto dictator, George Balanchine, stopped a class to examine Kirkland’s body and “rapped his knuckles” down her sternum. “Must see bones,” he told her. At the time, Kirkland weighed less than 100 pounds. “He did not merely say, ‘eat less,’ ” Kirkland remembered. “He repeatedly said, ‘eat nothing.’ ” Experiences like Kirkland’s (whose account has been corroborated by other company dancers) can be found throughout the ballet world. Balanchine’s preferred female body type — swan-necked, slim-hipped, long-legged, impossibly thin and capable of terrifically difficult footwork — became the enduring global standard for ballet companies and schools.
In the 1990s, ballet’s high-pressure and eating-disorder-friendly culture came in for some unwelcome attention. The press spread the word about anorexia and bulimia running rampant among teenage girls; gymnastics and figure skating also came under scrutiny. In books and press coverage, harrowing tales of dancers starving themselves, of smoking or snorting their appetites away, made for bad PR as the nation moved toward a new, tenuous “body positive” culture in which emaciation was no longer considered the height of feminine beauty.
The bad old days of American ballet teachers and company directors telling their dancers to eat nothing, or telling them exactly how many pounds they should lose, are largely over. The focus now is on optimum performance, on strength, on food as fuel. Companies encourage dancers to cross train at the gym, on top of their heavy rehearsal schedules and daily technique classes. They partner with nutritionists (Harrison, for example, was the in-house nutritionist at Atlanta Ballet for six years and now consults with the company) and team up with activewear brands to emphasize that their dancers are athletes as well as artists.
Company directors today commonly say they want “fit” dancers — provided that they also appear fit. That is, in addition to having the strength and stamina to dance a full ballet, they must adhere to the conventional understanding of what a fit person looks like. It’s not enough to lift your pas de deux partner over your head: You also need to have a six-pack while you’re doing it.
Read the full piece in The Washington Post here.
Note: Ms. Angyal was interviewed for DDP’s Global Conversations Round 3: The View from 30,000 Feet, which aired in the Fall of 2020. Her forthcoming book, Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet From Itself, will be published May 4, 2021 and will feature DDP’s work.
