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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

Pointe: Alabama Ballet’s Repertoire Offers Dancers Chances to Perform Works by Some of Ballet’s Biggest Names

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22 May 2020

By Rachel Hellwig

Flocks of swans, waltzing flowers, bourréeing phantoms and leaping princes are all regular sights in rehearsals at Alabama Ballet’s downtown Birmingham studios. Throughout its season, the company produces classical story ballets as well as works by major names like Twyla Tharp, Agnes de Mille and Jiří Kylián. “We’re classically based,” says artistic director Tracey Alvey, who trained at The Royal Ballet School and was a principal with London City Ballet.

But during Alabama Ballet’s annual Ovation showcase, the programming skews more toward the contemporary, as Alvey aims to “give the dancers something to extend their abilities. They need to be versatile, able to jump into any style and excel.” This May, the double-bill features pieces by two female choreographers: the lyrical Donnette Cannonie and German dancemaker Anna Vita.

Springing from three local organizations, Alabama Ballet traces its roots to the early 1980s, and was originally directed by noted Bulgarian dancer Sonia Arova and her husband, Thor Sutowski. Former American Ballet Theatre principal Wes Chapman served as artistic director next, from 1996 until Alvey’s arrival in 2007. Under Chapman’s leadership, the company began to present George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker. In 1998, Alabama Ballet added a school, which became RAD certified under Alvey.

Alabama Ballet performs four main-stage productions per season plus an in-studio show. Story ballets are a staple, so audiences can expect full-lengths—such as Romeo & Juliet, La Sylphide and The Sleeping Beauty—alongside mixed-repertoire programs ranging from classical to contemporary. In recent years, these have included Act II of La Bayadère, Études by Harald Lander, Tharp’s In the Upper Room, de Mille’s Rodeo and Kylián’s Sechs Tänze. Associate artistic director and resident choreographer Roger VanFleteren also produces original work, like Bonnie and Clyde and Alice in Wonderland.

“I love the variety of the repertoire,” says Ariana Czernobil, who’s now in her ninth season. “It’s so different from year to year.” A graduate of University of North Carolina School of the Arts’ high school program, she became acquainted with Alabama Ballet as a teen because her sister was a company member. “Since we’re unranked, there are also opportunities for new dancers to perform solo roles,” says Czernobil. “An apprentice might be cast in the corps and also in a variation. We cheer everyone on.”

Read more here.

Vox: Women are burned out at work and at home

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18 May 2020

By Emily Stewart

Sheryl Sandberg on the “double-double shift” women are working during the coronavirus.

Amid the coronavirus crisis, millions of Americans are working from home and trying to balance their home lives. And women, specifically, are bearing the brunt of the labor.

New research from Lean In, the women’s organization founded by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, examines how women working from home are faring during the Covid-19 pandemic compared with men. Their findings, at least to many women in that situation, are likely unsurprising: Women with full-time jobs, a partner, and children report spending a combined 71 hours a week on child care, elder care, and household chores — compared with 51 hours for men.

A quarter of women are experiencing physical symptoms of severe anxiety, compared with just 11 percent of men. Women of color are facing an especially tough situation: 75 percent of black and Latina women spend a combined 21-plus hours per week on housework, compared with just over half of white women; they also spend more time on child care and elder care than their white counterparts.

“We know that when things get hard, women get hit the hardest,” says Sandberg. “The double whammy of what happens in the workforce and then what happens to demands on home help has never been higher.”

Read the full article here. 

The Guardian: BalletBoyz: Deluxe review – striking dances packed with talent

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26 March 2020

By Lyndsey Winship

With their 20th anniversary tour now on hold, BalletBoyz rise to meet the challenge of theatreland going digital, taking their new show Deluxe online to launch the Facebook Premieres series from Sadler’s Wells.

No strangers to the screen, directors Michael Nunn and William Trevitt often use behind-the-scenes video to connect with the audience, and this show’s opening dance was always going to be a film. The Intro is a short by new choreographer Sarah Golding. It’s a striking piece with jazz dance flavour, its camp edge offset by the blokeishness of the six dancers, an enjoyable dissonance that whets the appetite for more of Golding’s work.

Nunn and Trevitt are never predictable in their choices of collaborators, giving us the first UK commission for Chinese choreographer Xie Xin. Her piece Ripple would probably have benefitted from being seen live (or at least on a large screen with the lights off), being all about tapping into an energy state, a continuous ebb and flow of rolling tides, the dancers crossing each other’s paths like warp and weft to the raw strings and electronics of Shaofeng Jiang’s score.

Maxine Doyle’s Bradley 4.18 fares well on screen. Renowned as the choreographer behind immersive theatre megastars Punchdrunk, it’s great to see Doyle’s work stand by itself. Rather than a free-roaming experience, there’s focus with just one camera, and it’s beautifully shot and framed (great lighting too, from Andrew Ellis).

Read the full article. 

The Lily: ‘I had to choose being a mother’: With no child care or summer camps, women are being edged out of the workforce

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22 May 2020

By Caroline Kitchener

If day cares closed because of the novel coronavirus, Aimee expected her family to fare better than most. She worked full time as the chief executive of a tech company while her husband stayed home. He’d been taking some time off from his own tech career, managing a rental property while considering his options. He could look after their 3-year-old son, she thought — at least for a while.

“That lasted a grand total of three days,” Aimee said. (We have withheld Aimee’s last name and her husband’s name because of threats made against their family.)

Once her son was home full time, she realized they’d need a different solution. She was holed up in the guest room, wielding dual-monitors at her desk. Her husband was exhausted. “I can’t do it,” she remembers him saying: “I can’t watch him for this long.”

Aimee, 46, had been logging 70-hour weeks for years — and she was proud of the work she’d done. When she started her career in San Francisco, she was one of two women at a video game company, buying nondescript jeans and hoodies so she could be “one of the guys.” Eventually she came to run a company she co-founded, building open-source websites for clients like Stanford University. Aimee, who oversaw software development, co-led a diverse team of 13 employees. She was intentional about hiring women, minorities and others who challenged the stereotypes about Silicon Valley.

Read the full article.

Broadway World: San Francisco’s Ballet’s Free Weekly Streams Run Through The Month Of June

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22 May 2020

By BWW News Desk

San Francisco Ballet announces further free weekly streams on SF Ballet @ Home, featuring commissioned works from the 2018 Unbound festival and other notable ballets from SF Ballet’s repertory.

For each of the past eight weeks, SF Ballet has streamed a complete ballet from its archives on Facebook, IGTV, YouTube, and the SF Ballet website, calling on regional, national, and international audiences to relish the joy of dance while sheltering in place. SF Ballet @ Home is made possible through the generosity it has received from the community through the Critical Relief Fund. The recordings are produced under agreements with the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, American Guild of Musical Artists, American Federation of Musicians, and International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.

The Friday, June 12 stream will feature Arthur Pita‘s Björk Ballet. In conjunction, SF Ballet will host a virtual, free Nite Out celebration in honor of the 50th anniversary of San Francisco Pride. Nite Out is the Company’s long-running series of performances and post-show parties that celebrate diversity and the LGBTQ+ community through dance. Hosted by an SF Ballet dancer, the June 12 Nite Out celebration includes a Meet the Artist interview on Facebook, DIY cocktail recipes, and a DJ-curated set list.

Over 60% of SF Ballet’s ambitious repertory season was curtailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. To commemorate the artists and creativity of the Company, SF Ballet will stream the complete program from the 2020 Opening Night Gala, Spellbound, on June 26 on SF Ballet @ Home. The stream includes the world premiere performance of Val Caniparoli’s Foreshadow, inspired by the love triangle in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and the SF Ballet premiere of Danielle Rowe’s For Pixie. Other programming highlights include SF Ballet premiere of the pas de deux from David Dawson‘s Swan Lake, danced by departing principal dancers Sofiane Sylve and Carlo Di Lanno, and the world premiere of Myles Thatcher’s 05:49.

Read the full article here.

DDP Debuts Global Conversations Series With 9 Top Female Choreographers

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Dance Data Project® (DDP) today introduces Round 1 of Global Conversations – The Creative Process, an ongoing online series of bite-size interviews that feature some of the most notable choreographers, artistic and executive directors, dance critics, and senior academics working in ballet today.

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The Washington Post: Chris Evert played tennis with a patience that’s in current demand

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By Sally Jenkins

Do yourself a favor during the shutdown and, instead of diving any further into the butter or the bourbon or the presidential bombast, take a lesson in patience from Chris Evert. You’ve filled this strange season with all kinds of sports classics, so while you’re at it, call up a French Open and just watch her. Watch the narrow squint and the firming of the chin as she refuses to be hurried. Watch her move the ball, use her racket strings to drag her opponents around until she has them where she wants them, and then crack a clean one. Forty years later, in the midst of this trial, her tennis doesn’t just hold up. It’s riveting.

Lord knows, you need patience right now. Patience with the dime-store elastic biting into your ears from the homemade bandanna mask. Patience with the detergent tang of cleansers in your membranes. What you need to handle all of that is not just patience, but Evert’s particular, stalking brand of it and what it teaches: Patience isn’t complacent. It’s commanding.

Read the full article in the Washington Post.

Women’s Media Center: Women academics are falling behind in lockdown

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By Lauren Wolfe

A lament about a lack of productivity runs through social media these days. Coronavirus lockdowns have created a kind of ennui and exhaustion, resulting in people slowing down in general. But in one field—academia—the drop-off for women in particular is measurable. As men have increased their research while home these past couple months, women have lowered their submissions to academic journals, indicating that women are less able to do their research while in stuck in the house.

The speculation began in April. “Negligible number of submissions to the journal from women in the last month,” Elizabeth Hannon, deputy editor of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, tweeted on April 18. “Never seen anything like it.”

Women on the thread heartily agreed, offering explanations for what’s going on. “My experience exactly,” replied Columbia University volcanologist Einat Lev. “I just received an email from a male colleague of my same rank and family status (young kids). Except, he has a full-time stay at home wife. His email read ‘this is a strange time but at least now, away from teaching, I can focus on writing.’ Sigh & Scream.”

It’s a stereotypically gendered reality. While stuck at home, mothers in the UK are providing at least 50 percent more childcare overall and spending 10-30 percent more time than fathers home-schooling their children, The Guardian reported in early May—leaving little time for academic research. At the same time, submissions from men to the Comparative Political Studies journal were up almost 50 percent in April, according to its co-editor David Samuels.

Read the full article on Women’s Media Center.

New York Times | Opinion: This Mother’s Day, Forget the Pancakes. Pay Mothers.

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By Kim Brooks

8 May 2020

In our country, staying home to raise children is one of the most devastating financial decisions a woman can make. And without any sort of child care system in place, it’s often not a choice at all. All but the wealthiest mothers face what I’ve come to think of as the Cinderella paradox. Of course Cinderella can go the ball, just as soon as she’s finished her chores.

This goes a long way to explain the feminization of poverty. Jenny Brown, the author of “Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight Over Women’s Work,” writes, “Parents, particularly mothers, become poorer because they are not properly compensated for the contribution they’re making to the continuation of society by bearing and raising children.”

What exactly is the value of this contribution? The birthrate in the United States has fallen to a record low of 1.73. People who complain that other people’s children shouldn’t be their concern will still have to deal with the economic catastrophe of an aging population and a shortage of young, healthy workers. If raising these future citizens isn’t socially necessary labor, I’m not sure what is.

And yet our entire economic system hinges on the willingness of women to do this work for free. Caretakers who work outside the home are poorly paid, but those who care for their own kin, in their own homes, aren’t paid at all. They receive a wage of zero dollars and zero cents, no health insurance, no sick leave, no paid time off, no 401(k).

For a long time, I tried not to think about it. One of the ways I was able to not think about it was because I could pay other women to lighten my load. For the time being, those days are over.

Maybe that’s for the best.

Read the full article in the New York Times.

See Chicago Dance: What is the role of the arts critic in a pandemic?

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By Lauren Warnecke

6 May 2020

Each month, I preview upcoming dance events for See Chicago Dance, highlighting the productions that excite me the most. My job is to entice dance audiences to circle a date in their calendars, to make room for dance and to experience something they might otherwise not have tried.

Large venues closed in mid-March as the COVID-19 health crisis found its way to Chicago. By the end of that month, nearly everything was shut down. Many Chicagoans have more room than ever in their calendars. I write trips to the grocery store in my planner so I can feel as though I accomplished something that day. And artists necessarily pivoted, reacting to the crisis by venturing into digital forums to continue to make work.

This column is not a critic’s pick of online dance concerts, because I don’t intend to watch any.

Over the past several weeks, I talked to many dance leaders. While it’s clear that dance is struggling, it is the nature of dancers to make it work and present an air of optimism. I felt this acutely in private conversations and in an online convening gathering leaders from Chicago Dancemakers Forum, Links Hall, the Museum of Contemporary Art, High Concept Labs, the Harris Theater, Pivot Arts, and others to report on the state of their organizations. I heard nothing but certitude, even as they spoke about postponed productions, cuts in staff, vanishing grant money and cancelled galas.

Legacy organizations like the Joffrey Ballet, Giordano Dance Chicago, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago and Ensemble Espanol, each with more than 40 years of history, have weathered many storms. None quite like this. They may survive by remembering what it was like at the beginning, trimming the fat and whittling down to the core of their missions.

Then there are those who will view the crisis opportunistically. With dance universally leveled, here is a chance for smaller venues and independent artists to get ahead, since they will be able to open sooner. Here is a once in a century window of hibernation in which to reimagine the arts, and to fix that which has always ailed it: Could the pandemic serve as a springboard to abandon scarcity models once and for all? Can a diverse coalition rise to ensure a more equitable, sustainable future for the arts?

 

Read the article here.