Upcoming Deadlines | click here to see if you are eligible for any of these opportunities

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

×

DDP Talks To

"The Devil Ties My Tongue" by Amy Seiwert performed for the SKETCH Series, 2013. Photo by David DeSilva. Courtesy of Amy Seiwert's Imagery

Performing ArtsHub: Opera and the doing of women

/0 Comments/in /by

By Sally Blackwood, Liza Lim, Peggy Polias, & Bree van Reyk

As reported by Alison Croggon in Opera and the invisibility of women, the New Opera Workshop (NOW2019) held in Brisbane in Aprilhighlighted the entrenched bias, the structural nature of sexism and other exclusionary forces that are reflected in many of the norms, expectations and practices of opera as an artform.

The conference was an invitation to practitioners to evolve new thinking for opera in the 21st century and it is in this spirit that we – and our co-signatories below – are making a call for change. 

NOW is the time for the opera sector to step up and join the conversation about gender equity, diversity and the championing of a multiplicity of voices. On the brink of redefining the Major Performing Arts Framework and in the wake of the National Opera Review Discussion Paper and Final Report, we ask that these points be urgently addressed. Now is the time for opera in Australia to evolve and to lead the way with diversity on our stages, in our creative teams, and on our panels. We are calling for a better vision for opera in its work practices and as an art form.

We demand a national commitment to systemic change:

  1. We want diversity to be reflected in all aspects of the opera we experience.
  2. We call for a questioning of the systemic acceptance of gender-based violence in opera.
  3. We want recognition, respect, advocacy and support for creators who are female, non-binary and from diverse cultural backgrounds.
  4. We call for safe inclusive spaces for people with diverse voices and abilities to set the agenda, to lead the conversation, to have a resonant voice.
  5. We want to decolonise the distribution of power so that the stories and creative work of women and all people with diverse voices resonate equally with that of men.
  6. We call for an unprecedented commitment to the programming and commissioning of new Australian opera work with gender and cultural diversity at the forefront.
  7. We call for those in leadership to back us and that the act of hearing be prioritised alongside the act of speaking.

Read the full call to action on the Performing ArtsHub.

Pointe Magazine: How Boutique Troupe Avant Chamber Ballet Blossomed in Dallas

/0 Comments/in /by

By Nancy Wozny

6 May 2019

Katie Cooper knows an opportunity when she sees one. When the Dallas-area Metropolitan Classical Ballet—where she’d danced for six years—shuttered its doors, she saw an opening for a new company: her own. “There were ballet dancers who needed work,” she says. So in 2012, Cooper, known for her Texas spunk, founded Avant Chamber Ballet, now considered the city’s cherished boutique troupe.

“During my performance career, I had never worked under a female artistic director or danced work by a female choreographer,” says Cooper, who began developing herself as a dancemaker when she launched the company. “It was time for me to move to the front of the room.” After starting ACB at 28, she quickly found that dancing, choreographing and running a company proved too big a load, so she retired from performing after the first few shows.

Though the troupe was originally project-based, local enthusiasm from audience members, musicians, dancers, critics and donors spurred Cooper to develop a set season. A threshold moment occurred when former New York City Ballet and Texas Ballet Theater dancer Michele Gifford returned to the North Texas area. Gifford, a répétiteur for Christopher Wheeldon and The George Balanchine Trust, danced with ACB for two seasons, and then, starting in 2015, began setting works by both choreographers. So far, the company has performed Wheeldon’s There Where She Loved pas de deux and The American pas de deux and Balanchine’s Valse Fantaisie, Who Cares? (concert version), Walpurgisnacht Ballet and Concerto Barocco. Cooper found that having big-name choreographers in the mix gave the company added momentum.

Read the full article on Pointe Magazine’s blog.

Comstock’s Magazine: A New Era in Ballet

/0 Comments/in /by

By Sena Christian

6 May 2019

Amy Seiwert is only the fourth artistic director in the Sacramento Ballet’s 65-year history. Seiwert — who danced with the company from 1991 to 1999 — assumed the role in July 2018. Comstock’srecently spoke with Seiwert about her vision and goals for the ballet.

Your inaugural season, “Roots and Wings,” is nearing completion. What were you hoping to achieve during your first season, and did you achieve it?

Coming in after 30 years of [co-artistic directors] Ron Cunningham and Carinne Binda, it is very important for me to honor that lineage. … We did [Cunningham’s] “Incident at Blackbriar,” in our first series at The Sofia theater, “Telling Stories.” To have him back in the studio and with the dancers and to watch him coach, that was all fantastic. Honor the lineage — that’s the roots aspect. But … where else can we go? How can I subvert people’s expectations of what they’re going to see when they come to a Sacramento Ballet performance? Also in “Telling Stories,” we did the ballet “Instructions,” which is based on a Neil Gaiman poem. He’s more associated with contemporary mythology and graphic novels than ballet. In that piece, I have a dancer who is live miked. He starts as the narrator of the poem and ends up locked inside the poem and becomes the protagonist of the story. It’s also got live music — there’s a cellist onstage.

Read the full article in Comstock’s.

Vibe: Queen Latifah Aims To Bring Diversity To Filmmaking Through Queen Collective Initiative

/0 Comments/in /by

6 May 2019

Queen Latifah has teamed up with Procter & Gamble and Tribeca Studios for an epic project aiming to promote the importance of gender and racial equality behind-the-scenes in Hollywood. The Queen Collective in partnership with Procter & Gamble and Tribeca Film Studios provides mentorship and production support, while also creating various distribution opportunities for the next crop of female directors of color.

Through the forward-thinking collective, budding directors B. Monét and Haley Elizabeth Anderson were given the opportunity to have their films (Ballet After Dark and If There Is Light, respectively) premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday, April 26. Their short documentaries are also available to stream on Hulu as of April 27. The collective supplies these young women with opportunities they made not have had initially.

Ballet After Dark “tells the story a young woman who found the strength to survive after an attack. She created an organization that is helping sexual abuse and domestic violence survivors find healing after trauma through dance therapy.” If There Is Light follows the story ofJaniyah Blackmon, who “wrestles with her new life in New York City as her mom tries to move her family out of the shelter system and into a stable home.”

Read the full article on Vibe.

Bay State Banner: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater celebrates 60 years

/0 Comments/in /by

Ailey Makes Conservative Moves Towards Equal Gender Representation in Choreography and Lighting

By Susan Saccoccia

8 May 2019

For 51 of its 60 years, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has come to town, each annual and wildly anticipated visit presented by the Celebrity Series of Boston. Last week, again presented by the Celebrity Series, the company brought its 60th-anniversary program to the Boch Center Wang Theatre for five performances. The programs featured Boston premieres of two contemporary works as well as a Sunday matinee, “Timeless Ailey,” a sampling from the founder’s 30 years of choreography, from 1958 to 1988. The company concluded all five programs with Ailey’s renowned 1960 masterwork, “Revelations.” 

For 51 of its 60 years, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has come to town, each annual and wildly anticipated visit presented by the Celebrity Series of Boston. Last week, again presented by the Celebrity Series, the company brought its 60th-anniversary program to the Boch Center Wang Theatre for five performances. The programs featured Boston premieres of two contemporary works as well as a Sunday matinee, “Timeless Ailey,” a sampling from the founder’s 30 years of choreography, from 1958 to 1988. The company concluded all five programs with Ailey’s renowned 1960 masterwork, “Revelations.” 

Thursday evening began with the most stirring of the contemporary works in this year’s program, “Kairos,” a 34-minute piece by Wayne McGregor, choreographer of the Royal Ballet in London. Ailey is the first American company to present the 2014 work, and the 10 Ailey dancers performed it as if it were created for them.

Its title is the Greek word for an opportune time or season, and its score is a re-imagined version of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” by composer Max Richter.

The movement and music, along with the set by Idris Khan, costumes by Moritz Junge, and lighting by Lucy Carter, formed a unified, deeply moving whole. Spare costumes showed the beauty of dancers’ bodies and the sinuous grace and athleticism of their movement.

The work began with a high-pitched, fast, minimalist electronic passage matched by strobe-lit dancers, who embodied each throbbing note. They performed behind a horizontal grid of black and white that resembled a musical scale or a hand-woven African cloth. Slowly the scrim receded to show the dancers, who seemed to be removing veil-like wrappings. As a man and woman joined in a duet, performing as equals in power and grace, the music evolved into a lyrical, fully orchestrated passage. They were like gods, distant but exposed, and combining sensuous beauty with dignity.

Read the full article in the Bay State Banner.


The Wonderful World of Dance: Ballet Now – First commissions announced

/0 Comments/in /by

7 November 2017

Birmingham Royal Ballet, in association with Sadler’s Wells, has announced the first three choreographers and first two composers commissioned as part of Ballet Now – a unique five-year programme of professional development for choreographers, composers and designers funded by Oak Foundation.

Ballet Now will create two new one-act ballets per year for five years, each with a choreographer, composer and designer who are creating their first dance piece for a large company on a large stage. In total 30 artists will collaborate on these new works, helping to grow the pool of artistic talent available to ballet companies world-wide.

This not only guarantees ten new ballets for Birmingham Royal Ballet’s dancers to perform, and for the Company’s audiences to see, but it offers those 30 artists an individual mentoring plan, a budget for their work and a level of creative support that they will not previously have experienced.

This ground-breaking initiative has been developed and overseen by a Creative Consortium; a panel of experts drawn from across the world of ballet supporting the selection of creative talent, as well as overseeing mentoring opportunities and the on-going success of the programme.

Read the full article in The Wonderful World of Dance.

Lake Country Calendar: Ballet Kelowna’s Spring fuses fairy tale with comic heroes

/0 Comments/in /by

By Sydney Morton

2 May 2019

Ballet Kelowna is closing its season with Spring.

A mixed program that features three re-imagined classics from Canadian female choreographers; Petrushka by Heather Dotto, Amber Funk Barton’s Firebird and Rite of Spring by Ballet Kelowna’s artistic director, Simone Orlando. Then it will conclude with Spring from one of Canada’s emerging talents, Alysa Pires.

When approaching her recreation of Firebird, Funk Barton deconstructed Igor Stravinsky’s 1910 piece by remaining the heroine.

“In my version instead of point shoes and being ethereal, my Firebird is grounded and athletic. It’s a totally different aesthetic,” said Funk Barton.

“It was inspired by an old Russian fairy tale and I was thinking about what are our fairy tales now. They are comic books and star wars and DC those are our fairy tales so how do I make it contemporary and still keep its classical essence… to me the Firebird is a combination of The Flash and Mystique. She is almost what is referred to as a meta-human.”

Funk Barton also changed the ending, in the original she said that the Firebird’s magic is taken from her however in this version she gives it up to help people.

Read the full article in the Lake Country Calendar.

Laurent Liotardo/The English National Ballet

The Guardian: She Persisted review – a fine rebalance

/0 Comments/in /by

By Lisa Allardice

14 April 2019

In 2016 Tamara Rojo, artistic director of English National Ballet, set out to redress the shocking realisation that in 20 years as a professional dancer she had never performed in a work by a woman. She commissioned She Said, a programme of exclusively female choreographers, now followed by She Persisted (the feminist slogan adopted after the notorious 2017 Republican putdown of US politician Elizabeth Warren).

What better way to open a showcase of female creativity than with the return of Annabelle Lopez Ochoa’s Broken Wings, an exuberant portrayal of the troubled life of Frida Kahlo? In an impressive debut, Katja Khaniukova brings a winning combination of vulnerability and defiance to the central role (danced by Rojo in its 2016 premiere), as we follow Kahlo from mischievous schoolgirl to her tempestuous marriage to Diego Rivera, played as a bumbling, middle-aged lothario by Irek Mukhamedov.

Mexican skeletons, male dancers in the flamboyant dresses of her self-portraits, dancing monkeys and deers speared with arrows – comic touches capture the surreal playfulness of Kahlo’s art alongside the darker incidents of her story: the bus accident she suffered in her teens and the terrible injuries and miscarriages she endured as a result, all imaginatively and harrowingly suggested. The whole is both sexy and sad.

Read the full article in The Guardian.

The Guardian: Bausch, Forsythe, Van Manen review – a company awakening

/0 Comments/in /by

By Luke Jennings

26 March 2019

In the five years since she was made artistic director of English National Ballet, Tamara Rojo has remade the company, introducing challenging new work and promoting a new generation of soloists and principals. Her latest programme offers pieces by three of the 20th century’s most influential choreographers: William Forsythe, Hans van Manen and Pina Bausch. ENB are the first British company to perform Le Sacre du printemps(The Rite of Spring) by Bausch, a notable coup for Rojo.

The triple bill will run at Sadler’s Wells until Saturday, and the fact that it is not playing outside London is a reminder of the hard economics underpinning a major-scale ballet company. At ENB, the books are balanced by touring classical story ballets such as Le Corsaire and Coppélia, and by a long winter Nutcracker season. So it’s good to see the dancers cutting loose in less traditional fare. It’s clearly liberating for them, but evenings like this also offer audiences the chance to see company members in a different context. Dancers who might spend most of their year performing as part of the ensemble, as pirates in Le Corsaire or Rhineland villagers in Giselle, can find themselves suddenly and strikingly foregrounded. Ballet careers are all about seizing the moment, about taking the chance when it presents itself.

Read the full article in The Guardian.

The Guardian: At the Heart of Gold: how ‘predatory’ institutions protected Larry Nassar

/0 Comments/in /by

By Brian Armen Graham

3 May 2019

For more than two decades, Larry Nassar used his position as an osteopathic physician at Michigan State University and longtime doctor for the United States’ women’s gymnastics team to molest at least 250 women and girls under the guise of medical treatment. The manipulation ran so deep that his victims for years believed there was nothing to report. In many of the cases the abuse happened while a parent was in the room, a tragic detail that offers an alarming metaphor of how blind we can be. It was literally happening in front of our eyes.

Not until a former gymnast named Rachael Denhollander became the first woman to publicly accuse Nassar in September 2016 – more than a year before #MeToo and the tipping point of a society’s reckoning with sexual assault – were Nassar’s many victims emboldened to break their silence. Denhollander’s courage encouraged more survivors to come forward, including Olympic champions and household names like Simone Biles, Gabby Douglas, McKayla Maroney, Aly Raisman and Jordyn Wieber, until the trickle became a deluge, generating the momentum necessary to bring a pillar of the community to justice – and not without initially severe public backlash.

This, the biggest sexual abuse scandal in US sports history, is the subject of At the Heart of Gold, Erin Lee Carr’s documentary that airs on HBO after premiering at this year’s Tribeca film festival. On the surface, the blend of archival footage and talking head interviews with current and former female gymnasts doesn’t offer a whole lot that hasn’t previously come to light. Nassar’s grooming techniques had already been recounted in stomach-turning detail during his trial, while the many institutional failures that enabled the abuse were laid out exhaustively in the Ropes & Gray independent report commissioned by the US Olympic Committee in the aftermath. None of the big-name Olympians who spoke out against Nassar in court last year participated in the filming.

And yet the 88-minute film succeeds where mainstream media too often failed as the story unfolded, making full use of its feature-length canvas in pulling together the many complex threads of a story that was always bigger, and more sinister, than a single monster.

Read the full article in The Guardian.