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

April 14, 2020/0 Comments/in Ballet Programming, Awards, and Season Announcements/by dancedata

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

April 13, 2020/0 Comments/in Pay Equity, Transparency and Safety/by dancedata

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

April 13, 2020/0 Comments/in Pay Equity, Transparency and Safety/by dancedata

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

April 9, 2020/0 Comments/in Ballet Programming, Awards, and Season Announcements/by dancedata

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

April 7, 2020/0 Comments/in Other Arts & Related Fields/by dancedata

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

April 7, 2020/0 Comments/in Pay Equity, Transparency and Safety/by dancedata

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.

April 6, 2020/0 Comments/in Pay Equity, Transparency and Safety/by dancedata

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.

Ellevest: Nothing Bad Happens When Women Have More Money

April 6, 2020/0 Comments/in Pay Equity, Transparency and Safety/by dancedata

From Alexandra Ramirez, Brand Marketing Director

Yup. Seriously nothing.

ICYMI: Earlier this week, Women’s History Month came to the most anticlimactic end in, well, history. And Equal Pay Day became a blip on our own, and the world’s, radar. As CEO Sallie Krawcheck wrote earlier this week, it’s hard to think about fighting for equal pay when people are fighting to make ends meet. Research shows, however, that people with less privilege — women and particularly women of color and trans women — are more likely to be negatively impacted in a pandemic. Similar to the gender-neutral approach to investing that has held women+ back for so long, there is a gender-neutral approach to pandemics. And while policymakers will say there are “bigger issues,” the reality is the gender disparities that existed before COVID-19 have only been amplified.So what’s a financial feminist to do? To be honest, I’m struggling to answer that question right now, too. I’m holding onto these four truths as I head into the weekend:
1) The fight for gender equality affects millions of women and girls and we must keep it in focus,
2) women supporting women is more important than ever,
3) we cannot do this without our allies and people of privilege using their power to prioritize gender equality, and
4) nothing bad happens when women have more money.

Stylist Magazine: On the frontline: the awe-inspiring women fighting coronavirus

April 3, 2020/0 Comments/in Other Arts & Related Fields/by Isabelle Vail

By Hanna Woodside

1 April 2020

As the world grapples with the escalating coronavirus pandemic, we all have our part to play in the fight against the virus. While many of us adjust to this new normal of self-isolation and social distancing, there are thousands of people working day in, day out to save lives and help those most in need. They’re the everyday heroes who deserve every ounce of our gratitude, admiration and recognition. So Stylist spoke to three women working on the frontline of the Covid-19 response, to get a glimpse into their vital work and the unique challenges they’re stepping up to. And we salute every single one of them.

Read the full article in Stylist Magazine.

Dance Magazine: The Dance Performances That Have Gone Online

April 2, 2020/0 Comments/in Ballet Programming, Awards, and Season Announcements/by dancedata

By Jennifer Stahl

16 March 2020

As COVID-19 shuts down schools and businesses across the world, just about every upcoming dance performance has been canceled. That means dancers who’ve spent weeks (and sometimes months or years) rehearsing won’t be able share their work with live audiences anytime soon.

But dancers are nothing if not creative. Many have quickly adapted and found ways to put their work online instead. Some companies are offering one-time livestreams to ticket holders, while others are putting up videos on-demand. Many are posting rehearsal clips that were captured before we all started social distancing.

The DDP team is (as always) working from home. During this time of self-isolation and quarentine, we are sharing our favorite videos on Twitter with the hashtag #DDPatHome – check out the posts for some videos of women in ballet: ballerinas, work by female choreographers, leaders, and more. Stahl’s list is a good start – she features women choreographers Mariana Oliviera and Sheena Annalise in her article for Dance Magazine above!

Read the full article on Dance Magazine’s blog.

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