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December 31st: New England Presenter Travel Fund, December 31st: Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet Scholarship, December 31st: 24 Seven Dance Convention, December 31st: National Theater Project Presenter Travel Grant, December 31st: Breck Creek Artist-in-Residence Program

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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

Wall Street Journal: Americans Can Track Stimulus Payments on New IRS Site

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By Richard Rubin

WASHINGTON—Americans can now track the status of their stimulus payments and provide their bank-account information to get their money faster via direct deposit, thanks to a new IRS website.

The Treasury Department has already issued the first round of payments via direct deposit, sending money to more than 80 million households that had bank-account information on file from their 2018 or 2019 tax returns. That money is starting to show up in bank accounts this week.

The IRS “Get My Payment” system made its debut Wednesday, though it was experiencing high volume and wasn’t providing information to all users. By providing bank-account information, people can get their payments faster through direct deposits instead of paper checks, which may take weeks or months to arrive.

Read the full article here.

Sun Times: Durbin, Duckworth, other Dem senators: End ‘ambiguity’ over jobless benefits for gig workers

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By Lynn Sweet

13 April 2020

A group of Democratic senators, including Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, implored Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia on Monday to “eliminate ambiguity” and make sure self-employed gig workers qualify for newly available COVID-19 jobless benefits.

The letter, signed by 32 Democratic senators, notes part of the guidance issued by the Labor Department dealing with eligibility “appear narrow or ambiguous, which could make states think they need to exclude workers who Congress clearly intended to receive unemployment compensation through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program.”

“While we believe that such workers are covered by the text of the law, we appreciate the Department’s action to eliminate ambiguity and ensure these workers receive benefits,” they added.

A package of unprecedented enhanced and extended unemployment benefits are in the emergency $2.2 trillion federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act — known as the CARES Act — signed into law March 27.

The CARES Act created the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, known as PUA. The Labor Department has the job of writing rules for states on executing the new program.

Read the full article in the Chicago Sun Times.

Pointe Magazine: Susan Jaffe Named Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s New Artistic Director

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By Steve Sucato

14 April 2020

Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre announced today that former American Ballet Theatre principal Susan Jaffe will succeed Terrence Orr as artistic director of the company, effective July 1. Jaffe becomes PBT’s seventh artistic director and only the second female director in the company’s history.

Dubbed “America’s Quintessential American Ballerina” by The New York Times, Jaffe comes to PBT after eight years as dean of the dance program at University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Born and raised in Bethesda, Maryland, Jaffe joined ABT II at age 16, followed by ABT’s corps de ballet in 1980, at age 18. She was promoted to principal dancer just three years later, and was a company star until her retirement in 2002. Jaffe has held a wide range of teaching and leadership positions since then, and has also choreographed for ballet companies and colleges around the country. She recently launched The Effect of Intention, a series of live and online wellness workshops and audio meditations.

Pointe spoke with Jaffe shortly after receiving the news of being named to her first artistic directorship.

Why leave UNCSA?

I love UNCSA and debated leaving, but being the artistic director of a professional ballet company has been a lifelong dream of mine. I knew I would regret it if I didn’t throw my hat in the ring. When the headhunter called to say the search committee had chosen me, I was so overwhelmed with joy and emotion and a little bit of fear. This is a really big deal for me.

What are you most looking forward to?

Being back in the studio. As a dean, I didn’t get to be in the studio as often as I wanted. I am really good in the studio and am thrilled to be able to do that.

…

Giving female choreographers more opportunities is something a lot of companies have embraced; will you and the company be championing any specific interests?

I want to make sure there is a beautiful, diverse pool of choreographers and that be one of the ingredients every time I am making a program.

Read the full article in Pointe.

Dance Magazine: Learning the Principles of Choreography, Alone But Together

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By Marina Harss

13 April 2020

Choreography may be the most social art. A composer can write music alone at her piano; a painter has his paints. But dance requires human bodies sharing space and physical contact, neither of which is possible at the moment. And yet the imagination is a powerful tool. As the choreographer Jessica Lang recently told a group of seven American Ballet Theatre dancers in a Zoom session, “We may not be together, but we get to use our imaginations.”

The dancers’ faces popped up on the screen, each framed by his or her current living arrangements. Some were sitting in living rooms, between the couch and the TV. Others in the kitchen, or in a bedroom. For an hour and a half, they talked, listened, moved.

The session was part of a new initiative connected to ABT Incubator, a choreographic workshop started by the dancer David Hallberg two years ago. That first year, the dancers were simply given time and space to create a dance. Lang, who has been involved since the beginning of the Incubator, felt this wasn’t enough. She suggested that it might be useful to have a forum in which the dancers could be exposed to principles that underpin the creative process.

So this year, ABT introduced a preparatory workshop, ahead of the creation period in the fall. Then COVID-19 happened, and suddenly everyone was stuck at home. Like so much else in people’s lives, the sessions went online. The dancers meet up with Lang on Zoom for an hour and half every Wednesday, for a total of five weeks.

Read the article on Dance Magazine online.

Women’s Media Center: Federal COVID-19 relief policies failed women workers — and now feminists are fighting for them

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By Carmen Rios

9 April 2020

The COVID-19 numbers have led to widespread alarm: 16 million workers have filed for unemployment, and 100,000 to 250,000 lives are at risk. “This is a public health crisis,” Senator Kamala Harris told viewers during a tele-town hall organized by nonprofit One Fair Wage on Tuesday, “that has resulted in an economic crisis.” For women workers, who make up a disproportionate number of the low-wage workers providing essential services during the novel coronavirus’s outbreak in the U.S., that crisis is both political and personal.

“The coronavirus catastrophe has exposed what has always been a devastating reality for millions of low-paid women workers across the country: Despite working hard and providing essential services that we depend on, they are paid rock-bottom wages that devalue the work they do and put them at high risk of living in or near poverty, even when they work full time,” Julie Vogtman, National Women’s Law Center director of job quality and lead author of the organization’s recent report, When Hard Work Is Not Enough: Women in Low-Paid Jobs, said in a statement. “As thousands of restaurant servers, hotel clerks, waitresses, and fast food workers are losing their jobs every day due to the pandemic, their economic security and that of their families have become even more tenuous. Let this be a wake-up call to policymakers to increase the federal minimum wage, expand paid sick and family and medical leave, strengthen unemployment benefits, and shrink the gender wage gap that shortchanges them.”

These recommendations echo the demands of groups like Justice for Migrant Women, which in March launched an Emergency Pandemic Fund for Farmworkers with Hispanics In Philanthropy to advocate for the 2 to 3 million farmworkers, an estimated 900,000 of whom are women, who continue to plant, pick, and pack the food we’re all rushing to pick up at stores or order to our doorsteps.

Read the full article on Women’s Media Center.

Women’s Media Center: Women hardest hit as U.S. unemployment soars

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By Lauren Wolfe

8 April 2020

As the economy continued to tank amid the coronavirus pandemic, job losses rose to more than 700,000 in the month of March—and women were disproportionately affected.

Out of every 10 jobs cut in March, women lost six of them, reported the Washington-based Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Hispanic women in particular are suffering; their unemployment rate rose to 6 percent, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics.

Across almost all sectors, but particularly leisure and hospitality—in which women hold the majority of jobs—women are feeling the brunt of the hit. With a nearly countrywide lockdown, people aren’t taking trips or going out to eat: Women’s jobs in restaurants, bars, and hotels dropped by 261,000, while men lost 181,000. The sector accounted for more than half of all jobs lost in March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. The industry had employed nearly 17 million people by the end of 2019. About 30 percent of hotel workers were Hispanic, CNN reported.

Unlike now, men were laid off first during the 2008 recession because of cuts to production sectors (including manufacturing and construction), said C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO of IWPR.

“This time around, because women are over-represented in the service sector, they will experience disproportionately higher unemployment and job loss compared to men,” Mason said. Service-sector jobs generally offer lower wages and fewer benefits, “which makes women more economically vulnerable.”

Read the full article here.

Major Arts/Dance Philanthropist and Misconduct Whistleblower Anne Bass Dies at 78

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According to her partner, Julian Lethbridge, Anne Hendricks Bass has passed away following a battle with cancer. Bass will be remembered, as a patron who, according to the New York Times, “Helped raise the profile of ballet in the United States, harking back to an era when art was viewed as a vehicle for beauty and moral uplift.” Her many philanthropic endeavors spanned from Fort Worth, Texas, all the way to Cambodia, and back to New York City, where her commitment to dance was most profound.

In 1980, Bass became a Board member at New York City Ballet, which she served for the next twenty-five years. Her support of another Lincoln Center establishment, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library, which “holds the largest archive on the history of dance in the world,” will also remain a steadfast aspect of her legacy.

At DDP, we will also remember Bass as a whistleblower for the misconduct of the former Artistic Director of New York City Ballet Peter Martins, who, Bass alleged, “Inflicted ‘cruel and excessive punishment’ on a student whom he had expelled just a few weeks before graduation.” Sokvannara Sar, the student, was a Cambodian danseur sponsored by Bass at the School of American Ballet. Bass herself had discovered Sar on a trip to Cambodia, and she subsequently plucked him from poverty to ensure he was trained in New York. According to Bass, Martins’ dismissal of Sar from the School was due to “boardroom politics in which he played no part.”

The dance world is today, of course, aware of the severe allegations of abuse and misconduct against Martins, who was retired in 2018 before he could be forced to resign at the company, which is now led by Artistic Director Jonathan Stafford.

Determined in her philanthropy and outspoken against an abuser, DDP mourns Anne Bass’ death alongside our ballet community.

Read the New York Times’ farewell to Bass here.

Ellevest: What the World Looks Like After This

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By Sallie Krawcheck

7 April 2020

The first order of business is to get through this coronavirus.

I’m doing any number of things more, to make up for doing lots of other things less — like going out and commuting and traveling. I’m exercising more, I’m drinking more, I’m eating more, I’m sleeping more, I’m cooking more. And of course, I’m worrying more. And I’m being grateful more — that I can cook more and sleep more, and that I have the privilege of working from home.

And I’m thinking of what the world looks like on the other side. And what really matters.

I hope that we come out the other side as a kinder nation. One that now recognizes who our “essential” workers are: the nurses, doctors, med techs, bodega workers, delivery people, farm laborers, warehouse workers, truck drivers, volunteers. And one that now recognizes the hard work of our teachers and caregivers.

I hope that also means we’ll be a society that no longer undervalues the contributions of its more vulnerable populations.

Ellevest was founded with the goal of getting more money into the hands of women.

And so can we just put a pin in one thing as we work through this?

Last week was Equal Pay Day, that bitter pill of a date that marks how many days into 2020 women have to work in order to earn what men earned in 2019. It means that women — on average — earn 82 cents to a man’s dollar. More for Asian American women and white women. Less for Black and brown women.

Read the full newsletter on Ellevest.

New York Times: A Ballet Scandal Gets the ‘Special Victims Unit’ Treatment

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By Gia Kourlas

27 March 2020

In a recent Instagram story, the dancer and model Alexandra Waterbury posted that she had just seen the preview for the latest “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” on television. She wrote, “I’ll be watching the ‘Kardashians’ instead.”

The “SVU” episode, “Dance, Lies and Videotape,” shown Thursday night, seemed to be loosely modeled on an incident at New York City Ballet. In 2018, two principal male dancers were fired after they were accused of sharing texts of sexually explicit photos of women, including of Ms. Waterbury. (An arbitrator ordered the company to reinstate them.) A third, Chase Finlay, resigned before he could be fired. Ms. Waterbury filed a lawsuit against the company, the affiliated School of American Ballet and Mr. Finlay, her ex-boyfriend.

In the end, Ms. Waterbury watched “SVU” and wrote a response in her Instagram stories. The episode, which takes her story to a darker place, is unflagging in its attempt to include every ballet stereotype, most predominantly, that all the women in ballet are victims. One character, naturally the gay male friend, sums up their world: “Straight male can’t fail. Gay men, it depends. But girls in ballet? Do what we say.”

It’s telling that the word is girls, not women. Infantilizing ballet dancers is a real thing. In bringing it out into the open, both on television and in life, progress is being made to give women more empowerment.

Read the full article in the New York Times.

See DDP’s related Instagram post here.

InfiniteBody Blog: It’s also okay to take time to grieve.

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17 March 2020

By Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Hey, friend! How are you doing? How are you faring in this new reality?

Me? It’s different from moment to moment, day to day. And that’s the way I’ve learned to take it. Because that’s the only way it’s going to work. The information and guidelines and rules we’re getting evolve as this coronavirus pandemic sweeps across the world, our state and our city, and we inch along towards an unknown future. We’re all trying to do our best.

Well, some of us, actually, are doing our usual. Which is not helpful. It’s a time for responsibility. And I’m livin’ in the USA where gun sales are rising and young people have to be forced to stay away from bars.

Anyway, my fellow Americans, my fellow New Yorkers, my fellow arts folks, here’s where we find ourselves.

Lord love us, the virus struck, our daily habits and plans and expectations got shut down but–damnit!–we got busy. Right away!

We’ve now put a flood of videos and livestreams out with everything from opera performances to yoga and meditation and cooking classes to art museum tours. Oh, thank goodness we’ve got the Internet and social media and the same electronic devices we’d just spent months and months complaining about and trying to spend more time away from so we could have authentic experiences with our loved ones IRL.

Read the full blog post here.