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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

Dance Teacher: Ballet West Academy’s New Director on Dream Building During COVID-19

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By Haley Hilton

19 October 2020

Evelyn Cisneros-Legate is bringing her hard-earned expertise to Ballet West. The former San Francisco Ballet star is taking over all four campuses of The Frederick Quinney Lawson Ballet West Academy as the school’s new director.

Cisneros-Legate, whose mother put her in ballet classes in an attempt to help her overcome her shyness, trained at the San Francisco Ballet School and School of American Ballet before joining San Francisco Ballet as a full company member in 1977. She danced with the company for 23 years, breaking barriers as the first Mexican American to become a principal dancer in the U.S., and has graced the cover of Dance Magazine no fewer than three times.

As an educator, Cisneros-Legate has served as ballet coordinator at San Francisco Ballet, principal of Boston Ballet School’s North Shore Studio and artistic director of after-school programming at the National Dance Institute (NDI). Dance Teacher spoke with her about her new position, her plans for the academy and leading in the time of COVID-19.

Congratulations on your recent appointment! What does this hiring mean to you?

For me, it’s kind of the pinnacle of my after-dancing career. To join a wonderful, large organization with such a fantastic reputation in the industry is really rewarding. To have used all my experience with San Francisco Ballet, Boston Ballet and NDI—all of that comes together to give me the experience I need for this.

Read the full article here.

DANCE DATA PROJECT® “ZOOMS OUT” TO INTERVIEW TOP ARTS/DANCE JOURNALISTS, ACADEMICS, AND DEI EXPERTS ON CREATING A MORE SUSTAINABLE AND EQUITABLE ART FORM

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Dance Data Project® (DDP) today announced the release of Global Conversations: The View From 30,000 Feet, the third round in a series of virtual interviews. Round 3 examines the state of ballet not only as an art form but also as a multi-million-dollar industry in the United States and a field of endeavor that must quickly adapt to the challenges of a pandemic or cease to exist in the post-COVID world.

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The Guardian: Tamara Rojo: ‘Despite everything, it’s a very creative moment’

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By Lyndsey Winship

12 October 2020

Tamara Rojo may be a great tragic dancer on stage, but in person she is far from the voice of doom. “The performing arts and dance have survived millennia,” she says, sitting in her office looking out onto a floor of empty desks. “They’ve survived pandemics and hundred-year wars and all kind of disasters. Getting together to share stories is intrinsic to humanity. People will gather, live performance will continue to exist.” Just maybe not quite in the way we’re used to, yet.

Ballet is finally putting its pointe shoes back on for a live audience. This month there are performances by the Royal Ballet, Northern Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet – and English National Ballet, where Rojo is artistic director, has just announced two live shows. In November, a live version of their upcoming digital season will feature five new short ballets at Sadler’s Wells, and in December there’s a slimmed-down version of The Nutcracker at the London Coliseum. Christmas isn’t quite cancelled after all.

There will be some drastic differences to pre-Covid shows, with less than half the usual audience (423 at Sadler’s instead of 1,400, and 1,100 at the Coliseum, where ENB usually sell out 2,300 seats). Will it be worth their while financially? “We are trying to find a way to not lose money, that’s all we want to do at this point,” says Rojo. “I passionately believe we need to restart the sector and rehire choreographers and technicians and lighting designers and composers and film-makers so that the engine starts moving, even if it doesn’t make financial sense.”

Making sure there’s still an industry on the other side of this pandemic is Rojo’s main concern. ENB had to furlough 85% of its workforce and many of the staff took pay cuts (20%-25% for most, more for Rojo herself). They haven’t replaced nine dancers who left this year, so the company is reduced in size. But on the upside, ENB’s swanky new Docklands building has seven studios, so there is plenty of room for distancing, and the biggest doubles as a stage, so they can broadcast from there. She thinks the UK’s larger and more established dance companies will be OK in the long term, but it’s the independent artists and freelancers and those working backstage who are in trouble.

“The situation cannot be sustained much longer. The loss of talent and skill breaks my heart,” she says. “The UK’s creative industries are the best in the world, consistently reinventing themselves and at the forefront of everything, it’s the reason for so many of us to be here.” She’s also worried about the ballet world internationally. Talking to directors and dancers in the US, she fears the lack of public subsidy there could mean even big institutions disappearing. “Nobody wants a smaller, less diverse, less interesting ballet world,” says Rojo.

Read the full article here.

The Lily: Quitting was her only option. She is one of 865,000 women to leave the workforce last month.

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By Soo Youn

7 October 2020

Jenai A. Rossow was working full time at a county clinic near Ithaca, N.Y., when shelter-in-place orders forced the first overhaul of her work life. The mother of two and social worker was able to use paid emergency leave as schools and day cares shut down.

Her workplace was great about it, she said. Her husband is an essential worker who never stopped going into the residential treatment facility where he works to teach independent living skills to children in the foster care system. The family gets health insurance through her husband’s job, but Rossow said she made “light-years” more money.

Throughout the summer, she waited to see what would happen with schools. In the meantime, she continued her leave of absence to care for her children, ages 3 and 7. Then the paid leave dried up and the family got word that come September, public schools would return with a hybrid learning model. That sealed the deal.

“We just couldn’t afford to put the 7-year-old in part-time care,” Rossow said.

She left her job completely.

And she’s not alone.

Read the full article here.

Hyperallergic: Artist Residencies Need to Start Thinking About Parents

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6 October 2020

By Daniel Gerwin

In hell’s innermost circle, exhausted parents search eternally for tiny Lego pieces needed to complete rocket ships, houses, and robots. This particular corner of Hades has been my home since the arrival of COVID-19. While artists without children post images of themselves making more work than ever, I and other artist parents I know are struggling to find time and energy for the studio at night, or working on the kitchen table while keeping an eye on the kids, or making no work at all.

Like all primary caregivers, since March I have simultaneously run a home school, a restaurant, and a hyperactive playground that occasionally becomes a boxing ring. The coronavirus challenges the canard that art (and all work) requires a devotion incompatible with family life. The virus also demolishes the corollary: that raising children requires the sacrifice of all else. With the quarantine’s interruption of virtually all forms of childcare and education, we acknowledge as never before that professional work must be somehow integrated with family life.

Artist-parents have always faced unique challenges. Art careers are forged in an informal economy where personal networks generate opportunities for exhibitions and introductions to curators, collectors, and other important players. It can be of major importance to be present at the right parties and openings, and to build relationships with other artists by visiting their studios. But for people with young children, it has always been a problem to attend openings that primarily occurred at night, and now, without schools or daycare, it requires new levels of innovation to make any art at all. The problems of working at home with children are now faced by parents in virtually every industry.

Read the full article on Hyperallergic.

Multiple Upcoming Virtual Performances from Global Conversations Round 1 Participant Stefanie Batten Bland

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8 October 2020

DDP was delighted to host Stefanie Batten Bland this spring as a guest in our first round of Global Conversations interviews. Since we conducted our interview with SBB, the lockdown has ended, and the dance maker/artistic director has gone on to receive multiple virtual commissions from venues, initiatives, and companies eager to produce new works virtually. In a newsletter, Batten Bland wrote, “We continue into our Fall season in such gratitude to bring our work to you virtually – both celebrating the past and pressing onward through our new normal.”

Check out a couple of the trailers for the virtual works, new and old, at the links below and view SBB’s episode of Global Conversations: The Creative Process at the end of this post!

  • Patient(ce): Created in Fall 2015, this piece offered audiences a rhythmic masterpiece inspired by jazz. | Streaming on October 8 at 7pm on HarlemStage.org.
  • Current: An intimate configuration of Company SBB to underline historical and present day directional up-and downstate tensions in the region during the pandemic. | Premiering on Duke Performances’ Virtual Fall Season.

 

About Company SBB

Company SBB // Stefanie Batten Bland is an intercontinental dance-theatre company whose interdisciplinary creations for stages, spaces and films question contemporary and historical cultural symbolism – and the complexities of human relationships.

Learn more at https://www.companysbb.org/.

DANCE DATA PROJECT® CONTINUES TO PROVIDE RESOURCES FOR CHOREOGRAPHERS SEEKING TO NAVIGATE AND EXPAND THEIR OPPORTUNITIES DURING AN UNPRECEDENTED CRISIS

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Dance Data Project® (DDP) today released its Choreographer Checklist: Working Towards a Global Market, a concise to-do list to help female choreographers navigate the changing performing arts field and widen their global audience through digital platforms.

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Duke Performances Virtual Fall Season Includes Global Conversations Alum Stefanie Batten Bland

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By Michaela Dwyer

Working at the intersection of dance theater and installation, Jerome Robbins award-winning choreographer/director Stefanie Batten Bland rebuilds the built environment: whether in the overlapping gestures of dinner guests, seated at a dinner table on a proscenium stage; wrapped and writhing within corded ropes along the parquet floors of a French parlor; or adjacent to the stone pillars of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, in moving memoriam of victims of police brutality.

As part of Duke Performances’ virtual fall season, Batten Bland’s intercontinental interdisciplinary vessel, Company SBB, explores a new work created for camera: a continuation of Batten Bland’s dance cinema practice, in alignment with the new daily choreographies of quarantine. Working from upstate New York, through river tributaries, Batten Bland marshals an intimate configuration of her company to underline historical and present-day directional up- and downstate tensions in the region during the pandemic. Those familiar with Batten Bland’s Duke Performances-commissioned work for the American Ballet Theatre Studio Company will see a thematic throughline in her ongoing investigation of monumentality: what’s upheld and what’s overturned in the material and geographical remaking of our relations.

Learn more and buy tickets here.

NPR: Enough Already: Multiple Demands Causing Women To Abandon Workforce

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By Avie Schneider, Andrea Hsu, & Scott Horsley

2 October 2020

Here’s a stunning stat: Women are leaving the workforce at four times the rate as men.

The burden of parenting and running a household while also working a job during the pandemic has created a pressure cooker environment in many households, and women are bearing the brunt of it.

It has come to a head as a new school year starts with many children staying home instead of returning to their classrooms in person because of the pandemic. And its forcing many women to make a difficult choice and drop out of the workforce altogether.

Just in September, 865,000 women over 20 dropped out of the American workforce compared with 216,000 men in the same age group, the Labor Department reported Friday.

“It was a really startling difference,” said University of Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson. “The child care crisis is wreaking havoc on women’s employment.”

Youli Lee is one of those women who hit the breaking point of working from home while caring for her children. She took a leave of absence from her federal job after finding it impossible to do her normal work from home while her three children — ages 8, 11, and 13 — were also at home doing virtual school.

Listen to the coverage or read the full article here.

Chicago Tribune: In ‘painful’ decision, Joffrey Ballet of Chicago cancels 2020-21 season

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By Chris Jones

1 October 2020

The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago said Thursday that it has canceled its entire 2020-21 season at the Lyric Opera House.

The canceled programing includes the world premiere of Cathy Marston’s “Of Mice and Men” and the Joffrey premiere of George Balanchine’s “Serenade” (slated for Feb. 17-28, 2021), as well as the Chicago premiere of John Neumeier’s “The Little Mermaid” (April 21-May 2, 2021). Previously, Joffrey had canceled this fall’s production of Kenneth MacMillan’s “Manon” (Oct. 14-25) and the first staging at the Lyric of Christopher Wheeldon’s “The Nutcracker” (December 5-27), typically a huge source of revenue for the company and a highlight of the holiday season in Chicago, drawing tens of thousands to the Loop.

The Joffrey said that the decision, sparked by the COVID-19 crisis, will cost the non-profit institution in excess of $9 million at the box office. A philanthropic fund, dubbed the Joffrey Crisis Stabilization Fund, has been set up to address the disparity and cover basic operations costs through the fall of 2021. The ballet said the fund currently has raised about $7 million toward its $12 million goal. The company has not laid off its company of dancers, guaranteeing their existing contracts through next May.

Read the full article here.