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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 Australia: After six years of operations, Melbourne City Ballet closed suddenly in June, leaving dancers and students in limbo. Susan Bendall investigates.

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29 September 2019

It was at the end of an in-house Studio Sessions showing of contemporary works by full time students that Michael Pappalardo announced the immediate closure of Melbourne City Ballet. It was the evening of June 27. Four days earlier, company members had received an email stating that activities would be suspended for 14 days. This was the first they had heard that the company was in peril. By the next morning, MCB was no more. The company’s wonderful purpose-fitted studios in Melbourne’s Pentridge precinct in Coburg bore a ‘breach of lease’ notice. The company was debarred from entering the premises. It was all over.

In the following days there was an outpouring of sadness and sympathy for Melbourne City Ballet. Dance Australia’s Karen van Ulzen broke the story with an interview with Artistic Director Michael Pappalardo who cited lack of funding as a key factor in the company’s sudden closure after five years’ operation. The magazine’s social media pages were blitzed with messages of support and appreciation as well as disgust at the government’s refusal to adequately support the small- to medium-sized arts community. People cared about the fate of this company.

Dance Australia, like other individuals and organisations, had been a great supporter of MCB. We started attending and reviewing performances from the outset. It was wonderful to have a local company bringing dance to audiences that might not be able to access the very prohibitively expensive professional offerings of the likes of The Australian Ballet. Better yet, as Pappalardo proudly announced, the company provided jobs for dancers.

Read the full article in Dance Australia.

Pointe Magazine – Onstage this Week: A Lot of Women

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By Chava Lansky

4 February 2020


Wonder what’s going on in ballet this week? We’ve rounded up some highlights.

Annabelle Lopez Ochoa Explores the Life of Frida Kahlo for Dutch National Ballet

In 2016, prolific choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa created Broken Wings for English National Ballet, a short piece diving into the life of iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Soon after, Dutch National Ballet artistic director Ted Brandsen offered her the chance to expand that work into a full-length ballet. The result, simply titled Frida, makes its premiere February 6-25 in Amsterdam.

In collaboration with British composer Peter Salem and Dutch designer Dieuweke van Reij, Ochoa’s ballet explores Kahlo’s fraught relationship with artist Diego Rivera, her bisexuality, the physical and emotional pain she endured and the way that she crafted her own image through her paintings. Dutch National Ballet has put out a series of YouTube videos exploring the creation of the piece; catch the first one above.

Read the full article on Pointe.

The Straits Times: Lyon Ballet chief sacked for firing dancer after maternity leave

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10 February 2020

PARIS • The director of a French ballet has been sacked for firing a dancer after she had a baby, the French culture ministry confirmed last Friday.

The unions had called for Greek-born Yorgos Loukos to go after he lost his appeal over discrimination against dancer Karline Marion, who was 34 at the time.

He was ordered to pay Marion €5,000 (S$7,600) in compensation.

Loukos, 69, who had been director of the Lyon Ballet for 33 years, was fired last Thursday.

Like the vast majority of ballerinas in France, Marion was on a temporary contract during her five years at the ballet.

In 2014, with her post about to become permanent under French law because she had worked through five contracts, Marion was let go two days after she returned from her maternity leave.

At the time, Loukas told the municipal authorities who pay the dancers’ salaries that he was sacking her because of her “physical and stylistic weakness”.

During a meeting with the dancer, which she recorded, Loukos told her: “If between the ages of 29 and 34, you did a fair bit, though not a lot, you are not going to do much more between 35 and 40, particularly with a child.”

Read the full article in the Strait Times.

Wall Street Journal: New York Philharmonic Begins Premiering Work of 19 Female Composers

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By Elizabeth Yuan

6 February 2020

Nina C. Young recalled a visit by her mother in September when a brochure from the New York Philharmonic arrived in the mail. “Oh it’s you! Next to Haydn and Mozart.”

She is among 19 composers whose works will have their world premieres as part of the Philharmonic’s Project 19, billed as the largest women-only commissioning initiative, in celebration of the centennial of women’s suffrage. Ms. Young’s “Tread softly,” which references a W.B. Yeats poem and thwarted dreams, on Wednesday kicked off the first of six this month. Two more world premieres will follow in May and June, with the other 11 in coming seasons.

Read the full article in the Wall Street Journal.

Dance Magazine: TU Dance’s Uri Sands Resigns Amidst Sexual Harassment Lawsuit

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By Lauren Wingenwroth

2 January 2020

Uri Sands has resigned as co-artistic director of TU Dance, according to a release issued by the company this week. A recent lawsuit alleges sexual misconduct claims against him, which he denies.

Toni Pierce-Sands, his wife and co-founder, will continue to lead the Twin Cities-based company as artistic director.

Both Sands and TU Dance deny the allegations made in a lawsuit filed in October by an unnamed former company member, including sexual misconduct and negligent supervision of Sands by the company. But according the release, Sands is resigning to “help TU Dance move forward in providing a safe and healthy environment for all.”

Sara McGrane, the lawyer representing both Sands and TU Dance, acknowledged that Sands did have a sexual relationship with the former company member during the time in question, but maintains that the claims in the lawsuit are untrue, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

This is not Sands’ first time facing misconduct allegations: According to the Star Tribune, an anonymous complaint filed in 2017 led to TU Dance adopting a sexual harassment policy, and a policy barring Sands from traveling alone with female dancers. Sands consequently participated in counseling and therapy.

Read the full article here.

Broadway World: 50 FORWARD: Dance Theatre Of Harlem Announces Annual NYC Season

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29 January 2020

The celebration continues this spring for the illustrious Dance Theatre of Harlem, following over a year of performances that both commemorated its 50th anniversary and paid tribute to its late, legendary co-founder, Arthur Mitchell. A former New York City Ballet dancer and the first black dancer to be elevated to Principal, Mr. Mitchell’s extraordinary, trailblazing vision for ballet thrives well into the 21st century through DTH’s performances across the country and around the world. Along with master teacher Karel Shook, Arthur Mitchell challenged perceptions of what classical ballet could be and created new opportunities for artists to join him in changing the landscape of the arts. Dance Theatre of Harlem’s 2020 season builds on this monumental legacy while looking to the future of ballet.

Dance Theatre of Harlem will kick off its New York City Center homecoming season with its annual Vision Gala on April 15 with an evening titled 50 Forward, setting a vision for DTH’s next 50 years. Bringing together the company’s past and future, the evening will feature the New York premieres of both a richly expanded version of Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s recent hit Balamouk, featuring a live performance by Grammy-winning klezmer band The Klezmatics, and excerpts from Resident Choreographer Robert Garland‘s soon-to-be-titled new ballet. Company member Dylan Santos stages Odalisques Variations from Petipa’s Le Corsaire, and the company pays tribute to late Grammy-winning operatic star and DTH Board of Directors member Jessye Norman with Arthur Mitchell‘s Balm in Gilead.

Read the full article on Broadway World.

HuffPost: How Ballerinas of Color are Changing the Palette of Dance

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By Rohina Katoch Sehra

Ballet’s aristocratic origins and an early association with opera mean that it remains wedded to a Euro-classical ethos. Certain ideas about it still persist ― that only an expensive cultural education can unlock its meaning and that it belongs in gilded venues accessed only by the elite. Then there’s the unmistakable race-signaling; despite documenting the decline of ballet in the late 1800s and showing us how terribly dancers suffered at the hands of predatory male patrons, French artist Edgar Degas’ paintings have bypassed their nightmarish context, at least in the popular imagination. Today these instantly recognizable scenes are visual shorthand for everything ballet embodies ― beauty, pristineness, perfection ― all of it encoded as whiteness.

Even today, ballet prizes the physical and emotive attributes that set European nobility apart from commoners ― poise, daintiness, adherence to etiquette and hierarchy, erectness of carriage. So it seems that ballet and whiteness are inseparable, to be divorced from each other at a cost no less than the extinction of the form itself. Some stakeholders reinforce this idea by favoring homogeneity, claiming a Black dancer in the corps could throw off the symmetry needed for pleasing optics. Others ostensibly reject Black dancers for having what they say are unsuitable contours. The cumulative impact of these beliefs is felt hardest by aspiring dancers of color.

Read the full article online here.

Verb Ballets: Meet choreographer Stephanie Martinez

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3 February 2020

Verb Ballets was thrilled to welcome sought after choreographer Stephanie Martinez to studio last week. Her versatility expands the boundaries of contemporary ballet movement language with original creations for Charlotte Ballet, Ballet Hispanico, Luna Negra Dance Theater, Sacramento Ballet, Eugene Ballet, Nashville Ballet, Ballet Memphis, Kansas City Ballet, Dance Kaleidoscope, Kansas City Dance Festival, Moving Arts Cincinnati, and National Choreographers Initiative among others, . In 2014, Martinez received a “Winning Works: Choreographers of Color” award from The Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. Stephanie Martinez mounted Wandering On, originally commissioned by Eugene Ballet in 2017 on the company. The work is inspired by the Sanskrit word Samsara that translates as “wandering through the constant cycle”.This work will make its Cleveland premiere on February 8, 2020 at The Breen Center on a program of all female choreographers.

Read the full blog on Verb Ballets’ website.

Sacramento Bee: Pints and plies: A pairing that brings opportunity to ballet and the uninitiated

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By Mitchel Bobo

29 January 2020

Artistic Director Amy Seiwert recalled debuting a piece during the Sacramento Ballet company’s inaugural Beer and Ballet event in 1994. The event was a chance for the troupe’s dancers a rare opportunity to step from the back of the class to the front of the room.

“It’s an incredibly vulnerable place to put yourself in. You make a ballet, you put it out there and you have no control how people see it, what they experience when they see it or what they take away from it. And that’s hard because you have to just put it out there and hope it reaches an audience in the way you intended,” Seiwert said.

Beer and Ballet’s choreographic workshops give nine members of the local ensemble the opportunity to create and perform their own pieces, which will debut Jan. 31 at 7:30 p.m. and run through Feb. 16. Each performance is followed by a Q&A session where dancers field questions from attendees.

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Previous reporting by The Bee highlighted Seiwert’s initiatives to create channels for women to step into leadership roles in ballet. According to the Dance Data Project, Seiwert and Sacramento Ballet’s commission of The Nutcracker was the only female-choreographed, full-length world premiere during the 2018-19 season.

“Amy is passionate about making sure there is equal representation of male and female representation in choreography. It’s vital that there are more female voices represented in the ballet world,” Feldman said.

Read the full article in the Sacramento Bee.

DANCE DATA PROJECT® COLLABORATION WITH BERKELEY HAAS SCHOOL FINDS EQUITABLE LEADERSHIP AT TOP 50 U.S. DANCE VENUES WITH AN AVERAGE OF 45% FEMALE LEADERSHIP

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Dance Data Project® (DDP) today published its ninth study. For this collaboration with the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership (EGAL) at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, MBA Candidate Patrick Crocker joined DDP in an examination of gender equity in the 50 largest U.S. dance venues. The “Dance Venue Leadership and Programing Report” reveals nearly-complete gender parity at all levels of dance venue leadership. Research indicates that if a venue selects a ballet company led by a woman, the resulting work is more likely to include works choreographed by women.

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