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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

New York Times: Employers Who Talk Up Gender Equity, but Silence Harassment Victims

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By Emily Steel

1 May 2019

SYDNEY, Australia — Kate Jenkins was hopeful when she opened Australia’s first national inquiry into workplace sexual harassment. As a longtime employment lawyer, she had negotiated settlements for companies dealing with harassment claims. Now, as the country’s sex discrimination commissioner, she knew chief executives who were emphatic about gender equity, in pay and promotion.

Yet when she asked businesses to waive nondisclosure agreements with employees — contracts that prevented people from confidentially telling the inquiry of past harassment — only about 30 companies and institutions signed off by the deadline.

Absent were the global consultants Deloitte, PWC and Accenture; the advertising groups Interpublic Group and Dentsu; and the bank Macquarie. All of them promote International Women’s Day, a celebration of women’s achievements, and many of their executives were listed with Male Champions of Change, an Australian group that encourages diversity in the workplace.

“They all gave me technical legal reasons, but as a lawyer, I know,” Ms Jenkins said. “It is not like murder. We are asking them to waive for just one purpose. They totally could have done it.”

Read the full article in The New York Times.

Gabrielle Lamb – Upcoming Works in NYC

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The work of choreographer Gabrielle Lamb, Full Circles, will take the stage in New Chamber Ballet‘s season finale this summer in New York. Lamb wrote for an email newsletter, “New Chamber Ballet performs with seating in the round, a unique arrangement that challenged me to look at my choreography from a 360 perspective.  Please join us June 7th (8pm) and 8th (7:30pm) in New York CIty Center’s Studio 5, and arrive early to get a seat in the inner circle.”

CelloPointe will perform a brand-new creation by Lamb in New York City, entitled Dandelion Clocks. You can buy tickets to this performance here.

Learn more about Gabrielle Lamb here.

Scene from Citizen, Choreography by Laurie Stallings, Courtesy of American Ballet Theatre, Photo by Rosalie O'Connor

American Ballet Theatre: From the Page to the Stage The American Premiere of JANE EYRE

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Watch ABT’s video below discussing the upcoming US premiere of Jane Eyre, a work of Cathy Marston. Video by Ezra Hurwitz.

Don’t miss the American Premiere of JANE EYRE June 4 – 10

Buy tickets via ABT.

BalletX Announces 2020 Choreographic Fellow – Nicole Caruana

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A small but powerhouse of a company, BalletX has had an extraordinary 13-year record of new works commissioned. Adding on to their stellar record, the company has announced that Nicole Caruana, winner of the Hanover International Competition for Choreographers and up-and-coming artist, will serve as the company’s 2020 Choreographic Fellow.

A beacon of a fiscally-sound company staging exceptional new choreographers, many of them women, like Caruana, BalletX is also premiering a full-length work by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa this summer. DDP Founder Liza Yntema will return to Philadelphia to attend the world premiere of this ballet, The Little Prince.

Read more about Nicole Caruana here.

Learn about The Little Prince here.

Just Released: “First Look” New Season Report: May 2019

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The following is a report on the gender distribution of choreographers in the upcoming seasons of the 50 largest ballet companies in the United States that have been reported so far this year (38 out of 50 as of May 23, 2019). The data is separated into subsections, focusing on different aspects of the distribution of male and female choreographic work included in the upcoming seasons. DDP cites sources and discusses limitations and important disclaimers at the end of the report.

Download the May 2019 Report

Read more

New York Times: When Twyla Tharp Made Ballet Modern

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By Gia Kourlas

22 May 2019

Twyla Tharp threw down a gauntlet in 1973: She mixed classical and modern dance to make the first crossover ballet, “Deuce Coupe.” It was a revolutionary work, and to pull it off she needed both the Joffrey Ballet and her own company. Its impact still reverberates through the dance world.

“‘Deuce Coupe’ said, O.K. look, we have modern dance over here and we have ballet over here and we have this big void in between,” Ms. Tharp said. “Why is there this gully in dance? I think everybody should be able to do everything.”

Set to songs by the Beach Boys — pairing pop music and ballet wasn’t the norm, either — “Deuce Coupe” was the introduction to a different world for Ms. Tharp too. Before its premiere, she said, she had never taken a bow. When she was handed a bouquet of flowers during the curtain call, she threw it back.

Read the full article in The New York Times.

Infosurhoy: Dance: Scottish Ballet: Digital Season on the Tramway, Glasgow

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By Denis Bedoya

21 May 2019

Two years ago, Scottish Ballet dipped a bold toe into new and uncharted waters with its first ever Digital Season: the short films, live streams and digital experiments put the company on screens – large and small – not just at home, but worldwide. Now, as part of this year’s 50th anniversary celebrations, a second (and more ambitious) Digital Season carries that initiative forward. The resulting works will be released online over the next four weeks.

First up is Tremble, co-directed and choreographed by Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple. There’s a wink of black humour in how 26 glam diners are, in quick succession, shape-shifted into athletic-balletic waiters bearing trays of wibbly- wobbly jellies.The role-reversal action is fast-paced, surreal – there’s even a Busby Berkeley moment, captured from above. Great fun, wittily clever. Frontiers is next, choreographed by Myles Thatcher, directed by Eve McConanachie and filmed amid the concrete pillars of the Kingston Bridge underpass. Here, six dancers – three women, three men – come and go in sudden close encounters where partners change in the blink of a lens, and aspects of gender and identity have a free-fall sense of self-discovery outwith ballet’s norms.

Read the full article on Infosurhoy.

Ballet Across America Focusing on Female-Led Companies

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BWW Interview: Theatre Life with Lourdes Lopez

By Elliot Lanes

21 May 2019

Since 2012 today’s subject Lourdes Lopez has been living her theatre life as the Artistic Director of Miami City Ballet. The company is performing May 31st through June 2nd at the Kennedy Center as part of Ballet Across America. The May 31st performance is a shared program with Dance Theatre of Harlem who will be performing May 28th through the 30th.

Ms. Lopez has a nearly 40-year career in dance, television, teaching and arts management. As a Soloist and Principal Dancer with New York City Ballet, Lopez danced for two legends of the art form, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Can you imagine being in the same room with those two on a daily basis?

Under the direction of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, her star rose quickly at New York City Ballet; In 1984, she was promoted to Soloist, performing countless featured roles including Balanchine’s Violin Concerto, Liebeslieder Walzer, Firebird,Serenade, Symphony in C, Agon, The Four Temperaments; and Robbins’ Dances at a Gathering, Glass Pieces, Fancy Free, In the Night, Four Seasons and Brandenburg.

Upon her retirement from dancing, Lopez joined WNBC-TV in New York as a Cultural Arts reporter, writing and producing feature segments on the arts, artists and arts education. She was also a full-time senior faculty member and Director of Student Placement, Student Evaluation and Curriculum Planning at New York’s Ballet Academy East. She served on the dance faculty of Barnard College and guest taught at numerous dance institutions and festivals in the United States.

Read the full interview on Broadway World.

The Walrus: When Male Runners Lose to Women

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By Leyland Cecco

2 May 2019

When alissa St Laurent set off towards the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains on a bright August morning in 2015, she was confident her intense training would be enough to finish the 125 gruelling kilometres of the Canadian Death Race. Ahead of her were three mountain peaks, leg-numbing switchback climbs, and punishing hairpin descents. In most years, fewer than half of participants finish the race, held annually since 2000, revealing the steely determination needed to overcome pain and exhaustion. But, early in the race, as St Laurent found herself among the sinewy bodies of the lead pack, a male runner looked her over and asked if she thought she could maintain the group’s brisk pace.

Frustration took hold of the then thirty-one-year-old Edmonton accountant. “I just made sure to just stay ahead of him before we got into that first transition area,” she says. St Laurent also remained ahead of every other runner, building an insurmountable lead through determination and patience. After thirteen hours and fifty-one minutes, largely spent racing against herself, she crossed the finish line to become the first woman in the race’s history to win outright. Her closest competitor was nearly an hour-and-a-half behind. She doesn’t know what became of the man who thought she was going too fast too early—only that she left him in her dust.

Read the full article in The Walrus.

Wall Street Journal – Australia Festival at the Joyce Review: Down-Under Disappointments

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By Robert Greskovic

13 May 2019

The dance presentations of the recent two-week, three-event Australia Festival were chamber-size thanks to the venue—the intimate, 472-seat Joyce Theater. Small scale need not mean insignificant, but there was little notable choreographic effectiveness. In the context of New York’s rich and varied dance landscape, most of what was performed proved to be, at best, of pleasant, passing interest.

“Attractor,” billed as “A unique music/dance experience,” with direction and choreography by Gideon Obarzanek and Lucy Guerin and produced by Dancenorth Australia, played out as a give-and-take exercise for eight casually dressed dancers, eventually joined by 20 prepped audience volunteers, to accompaniment from Senyawa, the Indonesian music duo of Rully Shabara and Wukir Suryadi. Despite its expressed aims of reaching trance-like and ritualistic states of being, “Attractor” amounted to improvisation-like moves that eventually blend, with the late-arriving audience participants, into tame follow-the-leader activity.

Read the full article with a subscription to the Wall Street Journal.