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 Story of Women Artists in Revolution, a Movement Against Patriarchy
By Kate Silzer
13 February 2021
In a powerful 2019 essay in Artforum, Hannah Black, Ciarán Finlayson, and Tobi Haslett made the case that artists who were slated for exhibition in the 2019 Whitney Biennial had a moral obligation to withdraw their work in protest of the then vice chair of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Warren B. Kanders. Kanders had made himself very rich in part through his company, Safariland, which manufactures, among other weapons and police equipment, teargas used by governments to quash civil protests around the world. The authors cite as historical precedent the New York Art Strike Against Racism, War, and Repression, which kicked off in 1970 after Robert Morris closed his own Whitney exhibition in response to “the killing of students at Kent State, the suppression of the Black movement, and Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia.”
In May 1970, groups of activist artists and members of establishment art organizations gathered together in advance of this strike. Among those represented was Women Artists for Revolution or W.A.R., a feminist outgrowth of the Art Workers’ Coalition (A.W.C.), an organization fighting for racial and economic equality within the New York art scene. Cindy Nemser, an art critic and member of W.A.R., reported on the event for The Village Voice, writing that “neither Morris’s brand of moral indignation nor his proposals were strong enough for all those present.” W.A.R., along with the Art Students Coalition, the A.W.C., and Artists and Writers in Protest, voiced “dissatisfaction with what they considered rather mild palliatives.” This article is one of many primary sources compiled in A Documentary HerStory of Women Artists in Revolution, first published in 1971 and reprinted in 2021 by Primary Information.
W.A.R. existed for a brief yet prolific period, from 1969 to 1971. The group ignited a robust movement against gender discrimination within, and widespread exclusion from, New York City’s patriarchal art industry, particularly by galleries and museums who saw art made by women as inherently illegitimate and therefore ineligible for serious consideration. W.A.R. set out to change this.
Read the full article online here.
New York Times: Female Artists Made Little Progress in Museums Since 2008, Survey Finds
By Julia Jacobs
19 September 2019
Over the past decade, there has been a sense in the art world that gender equity was on the horizon: Emerging female artists were landing high-profile solo shows, museums were staging women-themed exhibitions, grants were being awarded to boost female artists, and long-neglected artists were being given overdue recognition.
This assumption of progress is being sharply challenged by new data showing that between 2008 and 2018, only 11 percent of art acquired by the country’s top museums for their permanent collections was by women. And contrary to any hope that acquisitions of artworks by women are inching upward, the percentage remained relatively stagnant, according to the data, released on Thursday.
The new analysis was by Artnet, an art market information company, and “In Other Words,” a weekly podcast and newsletter produced by Art Agency, Partners, an art advisory firm that was acquired by Sotheby’s.
“The perception of change was more than the reality,” said Julia Halperin, the executive editor of Artnet News and one of two lead authors on the report. “The shows for women were getting more attention, but the numbers actually weren’t changing.”
Read the entire article here.
Pointe: María Riccetto Talks About Her New Role as Artistic Director of Uruguay’s Ballet Nacional de Sodre
By Marina Harss
16 February 2021
On January 1, 2021, Uruguayan ballerina María Riccetto officially became the new director of her national ballet company, Ballet Nacional de Sodre. Seldom has the selection of a new leader felt so apt. Riccetto’s career has been a model of hard work, perseverance and attention to craft, rewarded by recognition and responsibility.
Many ballet lovers in New York City remember Riccetto with great fondness. The former American Ballet Theatre soloist, born and raised in Uruguay, had a very particular quality: the ability to transmit a combination of affability and joy, in roles like the young girl in Le Spectre de la Rose, or Twyla Tharp’s Known by Heart, or even as a flower girl in Don Quixote. When she danced, you felt you knew her.
In 2012 she returned to Montevideo, her native city, at the invitation of Julio Bocca, who had just taken the reins at BNS. It was one of the most significant decisions of her career. She became the troupe’s leading ballerina, performing every important role in the repertory. In 2017, she was awarded a Benois de la Danse for her performance of Tatiana in John Cranko’s Onegin.
Along the way, she became a household name in Uruguay, as universally recognized as the country’s soccer champions. Since last year, she has been a fixture on the Uruguayan version of the TV show America’s Got Talent. There is even a line of perfumes named after her. “Floral, with a hint of jasmine,” she told me.
So it makes perfect sense that, after retiring from the stage at the end of 2019 at age 39, she would be tapped for the company’s top job. When I caught up with her in early February, via Zoom, she spoke from her new office, with a photograph taken during one of her performances of Giselle behind her. What follows is an edited version of our conversation, translated from Spanish.
Read the entire article here.
The Guardian: The #QueertheBallet movement: ‘it’s more than a man lifting a woman in a tutu’
By Emily Dixon
10 February 2021
Shortly after Adriana Pierce joined Miami City Ballet, someone watched her train and made an assessment: “Is Adriana a lesbian? Because she looks like one.” The comment propelled Pierce into exacting self-scrutiny: “I was like, does my dancing look gay? Do I look different? I am different – is that OK?”
Pierce, who left the company after seven seasons to focus on choreography and musical theatre, has rarely felt represented as a queer woman in the ballet world but with her new movement, #QueertheBallet, she hopes to inspire change. Her first project is a pas de deux en pointe choreographed on the American Ballet Theatre dancers Remy Young and Sierra Armstrong, which she is developing during a dance residency at the Bridge Street theatre in Catskill, New York. “I want to show people an authentic, complex relationship between two women through ballet,” Pierce explains. “I want people to see that ballet can be more than a man lifting a woman in a tutu.”
Although queer men are also largely cast in heteronormative partnerships, while facing well-documented homophobic stigma, the crucial difference for Pierce is visibility. “Queer women aren’t even on the radar in our spaces. I sometimes do experience overt homophobia, but the worst of it is the micro-aggression. I’m just never considered,” she says. “The idea that a woman might deviate from the image we expect as a professional ballet dancer is just not even a thought people have.”
Read the full article here.
Pointe: Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet’s “Constellation Project” Maps the Complex Histories of 6 Dance Pioneers
By Zoe Phillips
09 February 2021
Last week, Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet celebrated the start of Black History Month with the launch of The Constellation Project, a star-studded online exhibition of dance history. The project maps the lives of six influential Black dancers—Arthur Mitchell, Mel Tomlinson, Lavinia Williams, Mabel Jones Freeman, Doris Jones and Claire Haywood—across a digitally rendered galaxy of historical events, institutions and more. The result is an educational experience that, much like its galaxy-inspired title, will no doubt only continue to grow.
Writer and activist Theresa Ruth Howard founded MoBBallet in 2015 with a fairly simple mission: to make the invisible visible. She started with projects like her Roll Call of Black dancers and the Timeline that traces their presence back into the 19th century. These designs highlighted Black artists as individuals, but the more that Howard learned, the more complex these stories became.
“We don’t dance in a vacuum,” Howard explained recently, “and history is not as siloed as it’s presented when we teach it.”
Read the entire article here.
Dance: Virtual Ballet Classes Have Offered Me Glimpses of Gender Inclusivity as a Nonbinary Dancer
9 February 2021
Growing up, I quit ballet as soon as the schools where I was training no longer required it. Because of ballet’s adherence to a strict gender binary, I often felt excluded and frustrated by the art form, even before I had the language to identify how it heightened my gender dysphoria. Midway through college, I quit dance altogether, except for the occasional class, and took up weight lifting instead. But at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I began taking virtual ballet as a way to stay strong and exercise inside my apartment.
A friend of mine was taking classes on Zoom from a teacher who she said was particularly kind and thoughtful, and she invited me to join her. I agreed because I needed a distraction and my muscles craved fatigue. Ballet still made me anxious, and I even cried after class for the first few weeks.
But overall, ballet felt much more casual. Nobody had a barre at home, many people weren’t wearing leotards, and the main focus was on dancing together as best as we could during a time of crisis. Soon, my previous associations with the technique started to fade. Ballet began to ignite joy in me, and I started taking up to five virtual classes a week from New York City studios, like Ballet Arts, Peridance and Broadway Dance Center. In doing so, I’ve caught glimpses of what inclusive, gender-expansive ballet could look and feel like.
I didn’t come to understand myself as nonbinary until I was 20, but when I did, my frustrations with my dance training began to make sense. I remember being 14, looking through the studio windows at the boys’ ballet class and longing to be in there myself, working on leaps and turns and strengthening my shoulders. At home, I practiced tours and could consistently land a clean double. But during class, even when we were given the option to do either tours or turns from fifth, I felt self-conscious, like everyone was looking at me if I chose the “boy” step.
Now, even though I take virtual classes with my camera on, there’s much less scrutiny from my peers or teachers when I, a feminine person, do a typically masculine step. Alone in my apartment, no spotlight catches me, nobody laughs, and my choice isn’t perceived as a statement. I can do tours and mess up. I can be mediocre, because I don’t have to justify why I’m choosing a step that doesn’t match the gender I was assigned at birth.
During virtual classes I feel more comfortable dressing in gender-affirming dancewear. If I go to a studio wearing leggings and a T-shirt, traveling across the floor between women in their beautiful leotards and skirts can make me feel like I don’t belong or like I’m doing something wrong. It also helps that I don’t have large mirrors at home, and while that’s frustrating for self-correcting my alignment, it alleviates the dysphoria of looking in a mirror for an hour and a half, knowing that everybody in the room perceives me as a woman. On Zoom, I can put my pronouns in my screen name.
In a 1988 article titled “Performative Arts and Gender Constitution” in Theater Journal, queer theorist Judith Butler posits that “gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.” Virtual classes have given me the opportunity to explore how to do ballet like a nonbinary dancer, like myself. Dancing alone has taught me how to break out of the ingrained training of performing the bodily gestures, movements and enactments of womanhood in ballet.
Read the full story here.
