July 31st: Community Engagement Artists and Creatives Grant, 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
Lauren Lovette isn’t just a principal dancer with New York City Ballet — she’s also a choreographer. Since joining the company as a corps member in 2010, she’s captivated audiences around the world with her undeniable talent and charm. In this episode of Doing the Most, Lauren walks the Cut through her typical day from rehearsals to performances and everything in between. Her latest ballet, The Shaded Line, premieres at the company’s fall gala, and performances continue through October 13.
https://ddp-wordpress.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/13142018/Asset-2.png296600dancedatahttps://dancedataproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/DDP_logo_Primary.pngdancedata2019-09-27 12:43:032019-09-27 12:43:06The Cut: How New York City Ballet’s Lauren Lovette Gets It Done
BOSTON (CBS) — For years, women have been under-represented on the creative side of the ballet world. Boston Ballet is trying to change that.
The year-old ChoreograpHER Initiative encourages female members of the company to put their own stamp on the work we see on stage.In the season opener, “Giselle,” the woman who once danced the title role has restaged the production for the next generation.
Larissa Ponomarenko says there’s no need to do too much to a classical ballet that was created in 1841.
“There’s no need to redo too much, just some adjustments to amount of people on stage, because the size of the company is different,” Ponomarenko said. “Just maybe aiding slightly different technical elements to make it more interesting for male dancers.”
Principal dancer Lia Cirio is one of several women playing Giselle during the run at the Citizen’s Bank Opera House.
She is grateful for Ponomarenko’s guidance. “Getting to see her impart her knowledge of the role is just incredible. It pushes me to become even better.”
Cirio has also participated in the ChoreograpHER Initiative, although she never thought she’d want to be a choreographer.
She said “when a sign went up, I was like, ‘oh, I’ll just try it,’ and then it became this amazing thing for women…For so long, the woman was this object, almost, and the man was like ‘you do this, you do this’ and I think it’s really cool that now we can say, ‘I would like you to do this.’ Roles have reversed a little which is great.”
Cirio is now working on her third piece. “I’m really pushing myself and trying to experiment and take risks which is cool because that is what this project is about,” she said.
DDP Founder & President Liza Yntema is a principal sponsor of Boston Ballet’s ChoreograpHER initiative.
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With her first Emmy in hand, actor Michelle Williams got right down to business with her acceptance speech at Sunday’s award show: believe women and pay them fairly — particularly women of color.
The 39-year-old actor took fewer than 290 words to articulate her message and drew a standing ovation.
“The next time a woman — and especially a woman of color, because she stands to make 52 cents on the dollar compared to her white male counterparts — tells you what she needs in order to do her job, listen to her, believe her,” Williams said. “Because one day, she might stand in front of you and say thank you for allowing her to succeed because of her workplace environment and not in spite of it.”
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Dance Data Project® released its sixth comprehensive report today, this time examining gender equity in spring/summer dance festival leadership and programming. For the first time in a DDP study, women make up a sizable majority in the category of artistic direction. As always, sources and limitations are cited at the end of the report.
The Seattle Times: 6 dance performances to catch in the Seattle area in fall 2019
By Moira Macdonald and Megan Burbank
18 September 2019
A classic pointe-shoe ballet; a weekend of work examining masculinity, queerness, race and gender; and an array of new choreography all over town — yes, it’s fall in Seattle and the dance is begun. Here are a few highlights of the season.
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Locally Sourced
Here’s a welcome rarity at Pacific Northwest Ballet: an evening of all-new work, all from local choreographers. Presenting world-premiere ballets will be Eva Stone, founder/producer of CHOP SHOP: Bodies of Work; Donald Byrd, artistic director of Spectrum Dance Theater and a Tony Award-nominated choreographer (“The Color Purple”); and PNB corps member Miles Pertl, whose work has been seen at the company’s Next Step and PNB School performances. Stone’s work, “Foil,” will be set to music by female composers from centuries past (Nadia Boulanger, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann); Byrd’s, called “Love and Loss,” is set to music by Emmanuel Witzthum, and Pertl’s (as yet untitled) is scored by Jherek Bischoff. Nov. 8-17; Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St., Seattle; tickets from $37; 206-441-2424, pnb.org — M.M.
https://ddp-wordpress.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/13141413/Pacific-Northwest-Ballet-School-instructor-Eva-Stone-with-inaugural-year-students-of-%E2%80%9CNew-Voices-Choreography-and-Process-for-Young-Women-in-Dance%E2%80%9D-class.-Photo-%C2%A9-Lindsay-Thomas.-.jpg8321450dancedatahttps://dancedataproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/DDP_logo_Primary.pngdancedata2019-09-19 09:58:142019-09-19 09:58:16Pacific Northwest Ballet Presents Eva Stone’s Choreography & It Features Music By Women, Too
Ballet Hispánico, the nation’s premier Latino dance organization, returns to the Apollo stage on Friday and Saturday, November 22 and 23, 2019 at 8:00pm with a program that continues its commitment to staging works by female, Latinx choreographers. Ballet Hispánico is sponsored by GOYA, which has sponsored the company since 1977.
In the World Premiere of Tiburones, Anabelle Lopez Ochoa reimagines the world of the The Sharks (from the award-winning musical West Side Story) from a Latinx and gender fluid perspective. Ochoa will embrace non-gender specific roles while deconstructing stereotypes and giving new life to an ever-appropriated cultural icon.
In this restaging of Nací (2009), choreographer Andrea Miller draws from the duality of her Spanish and Jewish-American background and employs her distinctive movement style to investigate the Sephardic culture of Spain, with its Moorish influence and profound sense of community, despite hardship.
Con Brazos Abiertos (2017) is a fun and frank look at life caught between two cultures. Michelle Manzanales utilizes iconic Mexican symbols that she was reluctant to embrace as a Mexican-American child growing up in Texas, to speak to the immigrant experience. Intertwining folkloric representations with humor and music that ranges from Julio Iglesias to Rock en Español, the work brings life to a Latino dilemma.
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Dance Magazine: BalletX is Taking All the Right Risks
By Lauren Wingenwroth
In a sensual, troubled duet to the music of Amy Winehouse, dancers Chloe Perkes and Zachary Kapeluck channel the late singer’s fraught relationship with fame, performance and love. They embody the haunting gravity of her story—while wearing enormous pairs of bunny ears.
On paper, Trey McInytre’s Big Ones sounds like it shouldn’t work. But risky choices are par for the course at BalletX, and this risk pays off. Founded as a summertime pickup troupe in 2005 by Christine Cox and Matthew Neenan when they were dancers at Pennsylvania Ballet, BalletX is dedicated to performing new work—and lots of it. Its repertory boasts a whopping 76 world premieres in 14 years.
With just 10 dancers, it’s a model of what is possible for small contemporary ballet troupes—and it embodies many of the ideals that larger companies are striving for today. It commissions lots of women. Half of the company members are dancers of color. The work pushes ballet in new directions, whether through innovative story ballets or genre-bending collaborations. It’s deeply rooted in its Philadelphia community, and has fostered an open company culture rarely found in ballet.
And by embracing what Cox, the company’s artistic and executive director, calls “the good, the bad and the ugly” that comes with commissioning new work, BalletX has developed a daring, inventive repertory—and a national and international following.
DDP Founder Liza Yntema helped underwrite BalletX’s latest world premiere, The Little Prince, choreographed by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. Read Yntema’s interview with BalletX Artistic Director Christine Cox here!
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Each semester, the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership (EGAL), at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, offers a Consulting Projects Course. This fall, DDP is one of the select organizations participating in this course in which students are presented with a company’s unique issue, problem, or decision that is critical to advancing that organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
As DDP grows, we need help meeting demands for more data and insight into the roles gender equity plays in the dance community. Furthermore, our team is committed to benefiting from academic insight and learning the latest methods in data analysis and academic research.
We are pleased to announce that second-year MBA student Patrick Crocker will be working on our project in the EGAL course. Patrick’s expertise comes from 10 years on active duty in the U.S. Army as a Judge Advocate and heavy exposure to dance from growing up backstage at his aunt’s dance studio performances, to working as an accompanist for dance classes at Texas Christian University, and to collaborating with the University of Richmond dance department during law school. Patrick will consider two topics of interest, examining either major ballet venues or company-affiliated ballet schools in the United States, defining the scope of their market and revealing the gender distribution in leadership and programming. This project is tailored to develop a usable product of interest to both the dance world and leaders in gender equity, as well as to the general public.
The DDP team would like to thank Larissa Roesch, who introduced our founder, Liza, to this project and Jennifer Wells, Program Director of EGAL for making the collaboration possible. We look forward to sharing the results of this collaboration with our community in the coming months!
About Patrick
Patrick is currently a full-time MBA student at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley (class of 2020). Prior to Berkeley, Patrick spent a decade in the U.S. Army as a Judge Advocate, mostly practicing in the criminal, operational, and intelligence law fields. He is originally from Texas and has been involved with dance off and on throughout his life, including working as an accompanist for the dace department at Texas Christian University during undergrad and writing/performing music for the dance department at the University of Richmond during law school. He is thrilled to be able to contribute to the amazing work DDP is doing to support equity initiatives in classical ballet.
Learn more about Berkeley Haas’ Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership here.
https://ddp-wordpress.storage.googleapis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/13142018/Asset-2.png296600Isabelle Vailhttps://dancedataproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/DDP_logo_Primary.pngIsabelle Vail2019-09-17 09:23:592019-09-17 09:26:09DDP Takes Part in Consulting Projects Course of Berkeley Haas’ Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership
PITTSBURGH — The first three games of Pittsburgh’s football season wouldn’t seem like an exhibit of social change: a conference game against Virginia, a home matchup with Ohio and the 100th round of a rivalry with Penn State.
But when Heather Lyke, Pitt’s athletic director, scrutinized the schedule, she noticed something beyond big matchups: The Panthers’ first three opponents were Division I universities where women were in charge of sports.
“That will probably never happen again in my career,” Lyke said in her office last month, her tone at once elated and a little longing.
The coincidental scheduling streak is a sign of the begrudging progress made in elevating women into the executive suites of American sports. Its rarity is also a reminder of a sustained disparity: Of the 65 colleges in the nation’s five wealthiest and most powerful sports conferences, only four have women leading the athletic department.
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New York Times: At the Joyce, Embracing Tap and Awe
By Gia Kourlas
3 September 2019
When Aaron Mattocks became director of programming at the Joyce Theater in 2018, he didn’t have an agenda. He didn’t even have a list of artists he wanted to push. But he knew one thing: “I have no idea what this place needs except change,” he said. “I’m going to shut up and listen, and I’m going to shut up and watch.”
In retrospect, it was a good plan. A couple of weeks into his new job, Mr. Mattocks, 39, attended a discussion about decolonizing curatorial approaches. It was there that he saw, for the first time, the tap dancer Ayodele Casel. “She stood up and said, ‘I’m going to say this: Tap is a black form,’” Mr. Mattocks said. “I wrote down her name.”
Ms. Casel, who is African-American and Puerto Rican, spoke about how tap dancers were being displaced from performance and rehearsal spaces in New York City. “Obviously, I know that tap is open to everybody,” Ms. Casel, 44, said recently. “But I wanted to remind people that this is our tradition, and we shouldn’t be pushed out.”
Mr. Mattocks took note. Under his watch, Ms. Casel — a spectacular tap artist who has been working in the field for more than 20 years — finally has an evening of her own at the Joyce, the dance-dedicated theater that is one of the city’s most important spaces for the art form. In September, she will collaborate with Arturo O’Farrill on a program focusing on Afro-Latin jazz culture. To say that it’s about time is an understatement.
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Photo by Liza Voll. Courtesy of Boston Ballet.
