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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: Ladies First at American Ballet Theatre

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By Robert Greskovic

22 October 2019

The remarks at American Ballet Theatre’s Wednesday gala, which opened the company’s season that runs through Sunday, often focused on “ABT Women’s Movement,” launched in 2018 as “an ongoing initiative to support the creation, exploration and staging of new works by women for ABT and ABT Studio Company.” To that end, two of the newest additions to the 79-year-old troupe’s repertory presented at the gala were by female choreographers; another premiere, also by a woman, is in the offing this week, as ABT aims to right the imbalance between ballets in current repertory by women versus those by men.

So far the fledgling program has yet to produce a strong work, but perhaps Gemma Bond’s “A Time There Was,” which has its premiere tomorrow, will be the first. The two works already unveiled offer little to suggest they’ll find longevity at ABT.

Of these latest efforts, Twyla Tharp’s “A Gathering of Ghosts,” to Brahms’s String Quintet in G Major, Op. 111, held the stage more vividly but not impressively enough to indicate staying power. The 27-minute ballet showcases Herman Cornejo as its designated Host. Mr. Cornejo is celebrating his 20th anniversary with ABT this year and will be featured in a special program on Saturday evening that will include Ms. Tharp’s new creation.

Read the full article in The Wall Street Journal.

Pointe Magazine: Stella Abrera to Retire from American Ballet Theatre in June

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By Amy Brandt

21 October 2019

American Ballet Theatre announced today that, after 24 years, beloved principal dancer Stella Abrera will retire from the stage this coming summer. Her farewell performance will be June 13, 2020, at the Metropolitan Opera House, dancing the title role in Giselle.

Giselle holds special significance for her. In 2015, Abrera, then a 37-year-old soloist, made a triumphant debut in the title role, stepping in for an injured dancer at the last minute. (She herself had been slated to dance Giselle seven years earlier, but a debilitating injury sidelined her. It took years for her to fully recover.) Shortly after her performance, and after 14 years as a soloist, Abrera was made a principal dancer. “At my age and with the amount of time I had been out I didn’t think it was going to happen,” she told Pointe in 2016. “I thought, My career is going to be over soon, I’d better just go for broke whenever I go out onstage.”

Since then she’s more than made up for lost time in debuts including Aurora, Juliet, Cinderella, Terpsichore in Balanchine’s Apollo and Princess Tea Flower in Alexei Ratmansky’s Whipped Cream. The Filipino-American dancer has also spent plenty of time giving back: She founded Steps Forward for the Phillippines in 2014 to benefit victims of Hurricane Haiyan, and in 2018 directed a benefit gala in Manila to raise money for the Stella Abrera Dance and Music Hall at CENTEX (Center of Excellence in Public Elementary Education). She is also the director of Pro Studio/Stella Abrera®, a new training and coaching initiative for professional dancers at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park.

There’s no news yet of what Abrera’s next step will be. But in addition to her farewell performance on June 13, audiences can catch her this Tuesday at New York Koch Theater in Alexei Ratmansky’s The Seasons, as well as in performances of Giselle on tour with ABTin Washington, DC (February 15) and Durham, North Carolina (March 28). 

Read the full article in Pointe.

Commercial Appeal: Collage Dance Collective poised to become largest black-owned dance school in the South

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By Desiree Stennett

Kevin Thomas took his first ballet class at 7 years old. He didn’t see his first black principal ballerina perform in a dance company until 19.

And it would another decade before he saw a stage full of black classical ballet dancers while working as a principal dancer for the Dance Theater of Harlem. 

“When I came to Dance Theater of Harlem and saw that color all around me and saw that stage of color, it just was very reaffirming,” said Thomas, artistic director for Memphis’ Collage Dance Collective. “It’s something that you don’t get as a young person growing up in dance, at least back in my time.

“You knew that if you were black, you weren’t the right color for ballet, you had to try be something else. When I went to Dance Theater of Harlem, it was like ‘I am the right color. I am beautiful.’ That’s when I quickly knew we needed more Dance Theater of Harlems.”

That was the inspiration that launched the earliest iteration of the Collage Dance Collective in 2004 in New York. Back then, it was known casually as Friends of Dance Theater of Harlem. 

Today, Collage Dance Collective trains 235 students between ages 2 and 18 every week while maintaining a touring dance company that has performed across the world.

By Fall 2020, they will leave their 2,000-square-foot Broad Avenue studio for a 22,000-square-foot studio to be built in Binghampton near the corner of Sam Cooper Boulevard and Tillman Street.

The move will make Collage the largest black-owned ballet school in the South and one of the largest in the nation, according to Collage’s Executive Director Marcellus Harper.

He said the additional space could mean doubling the number of students they reach within the next three years.

Read the full article on Commercial Appeal.

Royal New Zealand Ballet Continues to Embrace Women

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Royal New Zealand Ballet announced its 2020 season yesterday, which included the announcement of the roster of works for the Venus Rising program opening on May 29, 2020.

The program will premiere two new works by choreographers Andrea Schermoly and Sarah Foster-Sproull (RNZB’s Choreographer in Residence), as well as works by Twyla Tharp and Alice Topp.

Each work boasts unique aspects sure to combine for a unique program – beyond being one of the few programs by a major company that combines this many female works. Tharp’s acclaimed Waterbaby Bagatelles will bring 27 dancers to the stage. Topp’s Aurum , meanwhile, is “inspired by the Japanese art of kintsugi, the practice of mending cracks in precious ceramics with gold, creating a new whole which celebrates the beauty of the broken.” The other two works, both untitled as of now, will round out the mixed-repertory performance with classical music inspired movements (La Folia and Beethoven’s birth inspire Foster-Sproull and Schermoly’s works, respectively).

Buy tickets and learn more on the Royal New Zealand Ballet’s website.

Click on the names below to learn more about the women whose works are featured in the program.

Twyla Tharp

Alice Topp

Andrea Schermoly

Sarah Foster-Sproull

Dance Magazine: Ballerina in Chief: Viengsay Valdés Takes the Reins at Ballet Nacional de Cuba

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By Marina Harss

18 October 2019

For decades the name Alicia Alonso has been virtually synonymous with Ballet Nacional de Cuba, the company she co-founded in Havana in 1948. Alonso died on October 17, just shy of what would have been her 99th birthday. In recent years, she had stepped back from day-to-day decision-making in the company. As if preparing for the future, in January, the company’s leading ballerina, 42-year-old Viengsay Valdés, was named deputy director, a job that seems to encompass most of the responsibilities of a traditional director. Now, presumably, she will step into her new role as director of the company. Her debut as curator of the repertory comes in November, when the troupe will perform three mixed bills selected by her at the Gran Teatro de la Habana Alicia Alonso. The following has been translated from a conversation conducted in Spanish, Valdés’ native tongue.

Were you expecting this appointment?

Not at all. The decision came from the Ministry of Culture. Because of her delicate health, Alicia Alonso had been forced to delegate much of the significant responsibility of running the company, and so they thought of me. I’m in charge of all the artistic and technical aspects: casting, organizing tours, programming.

How will you mark Ms. Alonso’s centenary in 2020?

I’ve been communicating with several companies in New York City and elsewhere. We will be celebrating all year, culminating in next year’s International Ballet Festival of Havana.

Read the full article on Dance Magazine’s blog.

Wall Street Journal: Where Women Fall Behind at Work: The First Step Into Management

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By Vanessa Fuhrmans

15 October 2019

The conventional narrative of the ambitious woman at work goes something like this: Woman joins the workforce with big dreams. Over the years, she advances in her career alongside male colleagues. Yet on the way to the top, she hits an invisible barrier to the highest corridors of power.

Long before bumping into any glass ceiling, many women run into obstacles trying to grasp the very first rung of the management ladder—and not because they are pausing their careers to raise children—a new, five-year landmark study shows. As a result, it’s early in many women’s careers, not later, when they fall dramatically behind men in promotions, blowing open a gender gap that then widens every step up the chain.

The numbers tell a stark story: Though women and men enter the workforce in roughly equal numbers, men outnumber women nearly 2 to 1 when they reach that first step up—the manager jobs that are the bridge to more senior leadership roles. In real numbers, that will translate to more than one million women across the U.S. corporate landscape getting left behind at the entry level over the next five years as their male peers move on and upward, perpetuating a shortage of women in leadership positions.

Few efforts are likely to remedy the problem as much as tackling the gender imbalance in initial promotions into management, says Lareina Yee, a senior partner at McKinsey & Co., which co-led the research with LeanIn.Org. If companies in the U.S. continue to make the same, tiny gains in the numbers of women they promote and hire into management every year, it will be another 30 years before the gap between first-level male and female managers closes, McKinsey estimates. But fix that broken bottom rung of the corporate ladder, and companies could reach near-parity all the way up to their top leadership roles within a generation.

Read the full article in The Wall Street Journal.

Photo by Liza Voll. Courtesy of Boston Ballet.

Boston Ballet Continues Its ChoreograpHER Initiative Next Week

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The Opening Night of Boston Ballet’s 2019 ChoreograpHER initiative showing will be next Wednesday, October 23 at the Boston Ballet Headquarters.

DDP Founder Liza Yntema will be in Boston to celebrate this special program dedicated to showcasing and championing the work of emerging female choreographers (for the second year in a row).

In early 2019, DDP featured Boston Ballet principal dancer and inaugural ChoreograpHER artist Lia Cirio on our blog. This would be Lia’s first attempt at creating a work. Her piece, Sta(i)r(e)s, was well-received by the Boston audience, and its creation signified a leader among dancers stepping into a role often encouraged only for men at other companies.

To The Globe, artistic director Mikko Nissinen said, “’The best way to help is to provide an opportunity.” The initial showings last year were sold out with, for the first time ever, six women choreographers featured in a performance.

Learn more about ChoreograpHER here.

DDP Founder and President Liza Yntema is a Lead Sponsor of ChoreograpHER.

DDP Mentioned in The Ashley Bouder Project Coverage – KentWired.com

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Kentwired.com: Dance professor’s work showcased in The Ashley Bouder Project anniversary show

By Abigail Miller

19 October 2019

Just two days before her piece “Don’t Explain” was to be performed at The Ashley Bouder Project’s fifth anniversary show, assistant professor of dance Catherine Meredith was in the midst of the only practice she would get with the ballet dancers performing it.

Associate professor of dance Jeffrey Rockland recommended Meredith’s work to Ballet in The City, the company that planned the event, when it reached out to Kent State for a piece from a local choreographer.

Meredith said she had initially sent a different piece called “Aftermath” to Bouder’s team for consideration, but it was turned down because it was too modern.

“Jessica (a representative from Ballet in The City) said, ‘Look, I love the piece but it’s too modern,’” Meredith said. “I said, ‘I have something else.’ I sent it and she’s like, ‘I love it. Let me send it to Ashley.’ Ashley saw it and said, ‘Yeah, let’s put it on the program.’”

The piece is set to Nina Simone’s version of the Billie Holiday song “Don’t Explain” and tells the story of a continuously unfaithful partner. Meredith suspected Simone chose to cover the song due to the similarities between it and her own life.

“Basically it’s a woman saying, ‘Don’t explain, because if you explain it that makes it real and then I have to do something about it,’” Meredith said. “Nina Simone later recorded it and in a parallel life she was married to a man, a police detective who was physically abusive. I think the song also resonated with her as to, ‘here I am, in love with this person who is hurtful.’”

…

According to a recent report done by the non-profit group Dance Data Project, 81 percent of the pieces performed during the 2018-2019 season by the top 50 ballet companies in the United States were choreographed by men.

Read the full article on kentwired.com

Nashville Ballet Brings Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” to the Stage in November

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Beginning on November 1, Nashville audiences can enjoy Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s acclaimed A Streetcar Named Desire . The work includes stage direction by Nancy Meckler, as well as costumes and set designs by Niki Turner. The female powerhouses behind the piece make it a notable program during a season in which women remain the minority within U.S. ballet company seasons.

DDP Founder and President Liza Yntema will visit Nashville Ballet in November to learn more about the company and its efforts to include and prioritize women in this and future seasons.

Watch the company’s promotional video for the production below!

Learn more about Nashville Ballet and the upcoming season here.

Alicia Alonso – Legendary Dancer, Director, and Leader in Ballet- Has Died

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According to the National Ballet of Cuba, Alicia Alonso, the prima ballerina assoluta and founder of what would become the National Ballet of Cuba, passed away on October 17th, 2019 at the age of 98.

For The New York Times, Jack Anderson wrote, “A ballerina of unusual range and power, she continued to dance into her 70s despite chronic vision problems.”

Celebrated both in her home country of Cuba and around the world, Alonso was a choreographer and leader as well as a famed dancer, and will be remembered long after her time on this Earth.

Read more about Alonso in The New York Times.