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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

The Guardian: Social DistDancing: street ballet surprises make hearts leap

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By Lyndsey Winship

17 August 2020

The squeak of a jogger’s trainers and the ting of a bicycle bell are not the usual soundtrack to ballet, but then a stretch of the Regent’s Canal in Hackney is not where you’d expect to see dancers from the Royal Ballet perform.

On a warm Saturday afternoon, the threat of rain in the air, bare-torsoed Harry Churches swoops across a pontoon jutting out over the canal, the audience on the opposite side of the water. Partner Annette Buvoli enters the stage and their bodies etch out classical lines and when the dance ends with an embrace, a swooning sigh comes from a group of young women watching through the railings, canned cocktails in hand.

This free, Instagram-advertised event is DistDancing, one of the few opportunities to see live dance at the moment and its founder Chisato Katsura is a member of the Royal Ballet. Katsura, 23, moved to a new flat during lockdown and her landlord, Russell Gray, also owns Hoxton Docks, a former coal store turned performance venue. When he found out she was a dancer, Gray asked if she could come up with a performance for the canalside. Katsura and Royal Ballet colleague Valentino Zucchetti put together a programme of performers across various dance and circus styles, including Royal Ballet principal Matthew Ball and partner Mayara Magri, and contemporary dancer Maëva Berthelot, formerly of Hofesh Shechter Company.

Read the entire article here.

Democrat & Chronicle: Trailblazer Aesha Ash chosen as first Black female full-time faculty at School of American Ballet

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By Gary Craig

21 August 2020

Once a teenager at the renowned School of American Ballet, Aesha Ash knows how moving and significant it would have been to have a teacher who looked like herself.

Now she will be that teacher.

“For Black women and people of color, to feel they belong in these institutions we have to see ourselves,” Ash said this week.

Ash, a 42-year-old Rochester native, has long been a trailblazer, knocking down racial walls in the largely white world of professional ballet.

She once was the sole Black female ballerina with the New York City Ballet, and, now, she has been chosen as the first Black female full-time instructor at the School of American Ballet, or SAB, in New York City. Teenagers and younger dancers study and train at SAB, an associate school of the New York City Ballet.

In a recent article, The New York Times highlighted Ash’s appointment with a headline that in part stated: “This former City Ballet dancer becomes the first Black female member of the School of American Ballet’s permanent faculty. Yes, it’s a big deal.”

Such a big deal that Ash, her husband, and their two young children — a 10-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son — decided to move from the California neighborhood they love to Manhattan for her to take on the faculty job.

“The reason why we made the decision is because this position goes so much bigger than just a ballet teacher at a prestigious school,” Ash said in a telephone interview this week from her new Manhattan home. “The historic meaning of this position was just something we could not look away from. It was my husband who was telling me, ‘Aesha, this is something you stand for. This has been your work from the very beginning.’ ”

Read the full article here.

Palm Beach Daily News: Miami City Ballet revamps season as pandemic persists

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18 August 2020

Miami City Ballet revamps season as COVID-19 pandemic lingers, replacing in-person shows with planned digital and outdoor alternatives

After spending the five months since the COVID-19 pandemic hit South Florida revising scenarios for the 2020-21 season, Miami City Ballet’s leaders have made a decision.

There will be no in-person performances as announced when the company unveiled its 35th season in March.

At least for now.

Instead, the company plans to roll out a mix of online recordings of performances of new commissions and older works, livestreams from its black-box theater, and outdoor performances.

“I call it an interim season,” Artistic Director Lourdes Lopez said. “This is what we can do during this period until we can get back on stage.”

The schedule hasn’t been solidified.

Buyers of the $1.9 million worth of subscriptions the company has sold will have several options: a refund; a credit for the 2021-22 season, when the company hopes to perform the works originally announced for 2020-21; donating the cost to a newly established Dancer Support Fund; or a combination of choices.

Company leaders never expected the pandemic to drag on this long when they canceled “Don Quixote,” the final program of the 2019-20 season; scrapped the gala; and sent the dancers home on March 13, Executive Director Tania Castroverde Moskalenko said.

Read the full article here.

Seattle Times: How Pacific Northwest Ballet plans to pull off an all-digital season

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By Moira Macdonald

18 August 2020

“All creative people love a good challenge,” said Pacific Northwest Ballet artistic director Peter Boal in a recent interview. His challenge was one that might seem unthinkable even months ago: to create an entirely digital season.

On Tuesday, PNB announced a 2020/21 season that in some ways looked like a typical one: six repertory programs from October through June; two of them full-length story ballets (“Roméo et Juliette” and “Coppélia”), the other four mixed-works programs. The choreographers represented are a blend of long-familiar names (Balanchine, Robbins, Tharp) and contemporary dancemakers presenting new work: Donald Byrd, Alejandro Cerrudo, Jessica Lang, Edwaard Liang, Penny Saunders.

But, like so many other things during this very strange year, this upcoming ballet season is entirely different: Due to restrictions necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic, this season will take place online. Most of the works presented will be newly filmed, under appropriate social-distance guidelines; ballets too large to be newly performed safely, such as the story ballets, will be presented in archival footage of previous performances or dress rehearsals.

Once it became clear that the new season would need to be presented this way, Boal said he “combed through the repertory” looking for works that would be appropriate. His challenges were multiple. First, he needed to choose work that could be rehearsed and performed allowing for distance: solos, pas de deux danced by performers already living together, small-scale works in which dancers are well spread out (such as the four-dancer final movement of Ulysses Dove’s “Red Angels,” included in the season’s Rep I). He needed to be conscious of using as many of the company dancers — newly returned to work after furlough — as possible.

Read the full article here.

CBS News: Aesha Ash is making history at New York City’s School of American Ballet

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By Elaine Quijano

17 August 2020

New York — After 86 years, New York City’s famed School of American Ballet is making history not on the stage, but in the classroom, when Aesha Ash becomes the school’s first Black female permanent faculty member.

Ash hopes to make a difference for her students.

“I feel that I have this hyper-awareness now of that dancer who’s struggling … and sort of see that sort of self-doubt creeping in,” she explained.

As a teenager, she had those self-doubts in a school with a mostly-White student population.

“When you look at performances, when you look at footage, when you see images on the wall … are everything but your own, that is saying something to the dancers around,” Ash said.

But she persevered, earning a spot with the New York City Ballet — one of only a few dancers of color.

Read the full article here.

 

 

100th Anniversary of the Ratification of the 19th Amendment

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On August 18th, 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified— that’s 100 years ago, today.

The passage of the Amendment was one of the first tangible steps on the long road to equity, a road which continues to extend before us, even today in 2020, and which sees women of color and other minorities marginalized to an even greater degree. As we arrive at this milestone of 100 years since women suffragists secured the right to vote, let us celebrate how far women have come but take note of the countless areas in which inequity prevails (and worsens due to the pandemic).

Read more

Wall Street Journal: Working Parents Are Hitting Their Coronavirus Breaking Point—and Paying for It

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By Christina Rexrode and Lauren Weber

15 August 2020

Working parents going on six months without school or camp are about to take another hit: rising child-care costs.

Parents with school-age children are hiring sitters or paying for online classes they wouldn’t need if their children were in school. Some are lining up tutors or switching to private schools that plan to open for in-person learning. Parents with younger children are bracing for potentially higher charges at their day cares, which are straining to pay for protective gear and additional cleaning.

Child care and its costs might seem incidental in a global pandemic, but they are integral to the economy. For individual families, higher child-care expenses can range from troublesome to financially debilitating. Rising costs divert money from other purchases or investments, and many working parents said child-care costs prevent them from saving for a home. Yet without child care, parents are less productive at work—not to mention more stressed and tired.

“Here’s the deal,” said Misty Heggeness, an economist who wrote about the pandemic’s effect on working mothers for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. “If you care about U.S. economic growth…this should be one of the first areas of concern for you.”

Read the full article here.

Pointe: What’s Ahead for Ballet Companies in the Age of COVID-19?

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By Avichai Scher

12 August 2020

Let’s be frank: No one knows what’s ahead for the performing arts in the U.S. With COVID-19 forcing the cancellation of nearly a year of performances so far, including many Nutcrackers, ballet companies face a daunting path ahead with no roadmap for how to survive. While schools can offer classes online or in small groups, what does the future hold for companies when it’s not safe to gather large audiences or corps de ballet?

“We are in for a very hard set of months,” says Michael M. Kaiser, chairman of the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland. “Nothing will change until there’s a vaccine.”

Pointe set out to find out what the new normal looks like while the virus is with us.

Online Content and Digital Seasons

When COVID-19 hit, it seemed everything moved online that could, from galas to company class. In a recent online panel, American Ballet Theatre artistic director Kevin McKenzie said the company’s May online gala, which did not include much dancing, was well-received but not a financial success. The Washington Ballet’s gala centered on livestreamed performances and was financially successful. But afterwards, artistic director Julie Kent, a company dancer and a gala chairwoman became ill with COVID-19, despite social distancing and other safety precautions.

Can online platforms be a safe, longer-term source of income and artistic outlet for ballet companies?

Marc Kirschner, a founder of the paid performing arts streaming service Marquee TV, says this moment is a line in the sand for companies’ survival.

Read the full article here.

The New Yorker: In the Gendered Economy, Women Are Perpetual Debtors

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By Nora Caplan-Bricker

10 August 2020

Women make up nearly nine in ten nurses, more than eight in ten home health aides, and more than two-thirds of grocery-store cashiers. In other words, they perform the lion’s share of the vital care that we now call “essential” work. At the same time, since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, women have been laid off at an outsized rate (a reflection of their concentration within the country’s lowest-compensated, least-secure jobs) and have been forced to reduce their paid hours to look after children at nearly twice the rate of their male partners. As the kinds of labor that sustain life have grown deadlier, women have taken on more of the risk. As paid work and the time to perform it become scarcer resources, men are retaining the better part of both.

What conclusions can we draw from the gendered dimensions of the current crisis? Kate Manne’s “Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women” presents a paradigm that maps neatly onto life in lockdown. Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell, argues that women “are expected to give traditionally feminine goods”—including physical and emotional care—and “to refrain from taking traditionally masculine goods,” such as power and authority. These assumptions result in a society in which men “are tacitly deemed entitled” to much of what life has to offer, while women are perpetual debtors, their very humanity “owed to others.”

Once again, Manne’s work is speaking to a moment that she could not have foreseen. Her first book, “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny,” was released into the gathering storm of the #MeToo movement, in November, 2017. It was uncanny timing, and the intuitive explanatory power of Manne’s argument attracted a broad, enthusiastic following to a demanding academic work. Manne proposed that misogyny “should be understood as the ‘law enforcement’ branch of a patriarchal order,” a system of punishment that swings into action whenever women violate the rules. Sexism, by contrast, is the set of ideas that justifies the power which men hold. “Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts,” Manne writes in “Down Girl.” “Sexism has a theory; misogyny wields a cudgel.”

In “Entitled,” Manne turns her attention to the gendered economy that these forces defend. If sexism is a scientist and misogyny is a cop, then the system of entitlements is a suite of financiers forever seeking ways to profit off someone else’s debt. Manne applies her theory to a litany of lopsided situations, sorting them into one of three scenarios: first, how women can be punished for failing to provide sex, love, admiration, or anything else that the dominant sex considers its due (Manne points to mass murders perpetrated by incels, who kill in protest of perceived rejection); second, how women struggle to lay claim to masculine-coded powers and privileges, the Presidency being one prominent example; and, third, how women may be denied the feminine-coded forms of care—such as attention to their pain—that they are expected to supply, not demand.

Manne first posited this slanted system of goods and services in “Down Girl,” and her arguments in “Entitled,” her first book for a general audience, may at times feel overly familiar to readers already acquainted with her work. In some cases, the new book remedies the other’s omissions, especially by considering transmisogyny and misogynoir, the interlocking systems of oppression that affect trans and Black women, respectively. Manne illustrates her ideas with recent headlines and cultural touchstones, travelling smoothly from the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to the sentencing of Brock Turner, from the movie “Gaslight” to the short story “Cat Person.” Manne examines these stories in order to reveal what male entitlement costs women and non-binary people, and how we might begin to resist its demands, even as the invisible matrix of male power shapes every imaginable interaction.

Read the full article online here.

Dance Australia: Dancers without borders: Danielle Rowe

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By Geraldine Higginson

16 December 2019

Former Australian Ballet principal is working up a fury in San Francisco.

Some dancers have a set list of goals from a young age, and move through life ticking them off one after the other; others change path and direction as they go, finding new goals along the way.

Readers who have watched the Australian Ballet (AB) for a decade or more might remember a former principal dancer by the name of Danielle Rowe — who danced with the company from 2001 to 2011. Tall and striking, she excelled in both classical and contemporary roles with the AB until a restless nature and a desire to seek new challenges took her overseas.

First stop was Houston Ballet, until her application for Netherlands Dance Theatre (NDT) — sent on a whim, never expecting to actually get in — was accepted, precipitating a second move to the Netherlands after one season in Houston.

Read the full article here.