When Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell was hired as Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s new artistic director in January, she knew she wanted to focus on the company’s diversity, both onstage and off.
“But what does it really mean?” she said. “Are we going to talk a good game, or are we going to do it?”
Fisher-Harrell, the first person of color and first woman to hold the top role at Hubbard Street, wanted the company to look like Chicago.
Right away, she hired four dancers of color. Of the eight choreographers whose work the company will perform this season, three are people of color and two are women.
In the world of dance, Fisher-Harrell is a bit of an anomaly. Of the 50 largest ballet companies in the United States, of which Hubbard Street is one, only 30% have female artistic directors. Among the 10 largest companies, there is only one female artistic director: Lourdes Lopez of Miami City Ballet.
Those statistics come from the Dance Data Project, a nonprofit that tracks data related to gender equity in dance. In August, the data project released its annual report on the 2020-2021 season — a season marked by the challenges COVID-19 brought to live performance of all kinds. It found that 69% of works performed by the 50 largest ballet companies in the United States — including the Joffrey Ballet and Hubbard Street Dance in Chicago — were choreographed by men. The year before, that percentage was 72%; two years ago, it was a much higher at 81%.
Many of the women who spoke with the Tribune said things wouldn’t really change until more women are artistic directors, leading companies and making the decisions about which choreographers to hire.
“I just feel like women have a unique voice, period,” Fisher-Harrell said. “And a lot of times our voice is subdued or suppressed. And so if I can get that worldview out there, come on, let’s do it. If I can promote the next woman, come on. If I can support the next woman, let’s go.”
A former principal dancer with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Fisher-Harrell was a professor of dance at Towson University in Maryland before taking on the top job at Hubbard Street. When she was a dancer, she hadn’t considered taking on leadership roles. “I think I had, to a certain degree, had blinders on,” she said, “meaning I concentrated on myself as a performer.”
Now, as the company rehearses for its season-opening performance in November, she said she feels blessed that Hubbard Street made the decision to hire her for its top job. “More companies need to take that chance, to make that investment,” she said, “to make that change in thought.”
Like Fisher-Harrell, Stephanie Martinez didn’t always envision herself leading a room.
Martinez started dancing when she moved to Chicago from her native El Paso, Texas, at 18. She didn’t start choreographing until she was just shy of 40, when Eduardo Vilaro, now the artistic director of Ballet Hispánico in New York, asked her to work with another artist on a piece for the 10th anniversary of his Chicago dance company, Luna Negra Dance Theater.
“I think if it wasn’t for somebody asking me to choreograph, I don’t think I would have seen myself in that position,” said Martinez, who is the founder and artistic director of PARA.MAR Dance Theatre, a new Chicago-based contemporary ballet company. “I really didn’t see any other females of color in front of the room. That for me just wasn’t a reality when I was dancing, and it didn’t seem like something that was possible.”
After her piece for Luna Negra, Martinez found her unexpected career gaining traction. She has since choreographed for the Joffrey Ballet, Vilaro’s Ballet Hispánico, Charlotte Ballet, Kansas City Ballet, Sacramento Ballet and more. Last year, at a time when it felt as if everything else had died and stopped growing, she founded Chicago’s PARA.MAR.
“Now I’m in the front of the room, in charge, and able to write my own narrative and tell my own story through my storytelling,” she said. “That to me feels like process, and progress.”
Ballet’s glass ceiling
“Ballet is woman,” the choreographer George Balanchine once famously said. It’s difficult to overstate the legacy of Balanchine, who revolutionized dance and is often referred to as the father of American ballet. As the artistic director at New York City Ballet, he tended to treat his female dancers as muses — and to marry them, which he did multiple times. He was well-known for his narrow vision of what made a ballet body.
“I think it’s problematic in that he saw the female dancers as the instrument of his work,” said Wendy Oliver, a professor of dance and women’s and gender studies at Providence College. “The body of the female dancers was his material that he worked with and he could shape it however he liked.”
Even today, a female-dominated stage can mask what’s happening offstage, where men are still so frequently making the big decisions.
Elizabeth “Liza” Yntema founded the Dance Data Project after coming to that unsettling realization nearly a decade ago at a performance in Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre.
“I looked at the stage, and I realized that I had not seen a woman’s voice, a woman-told story all season. And I hadn’t seen one the season before,” Yntema said, though she acknowledges she didn’t make it to every single performance at the theater. The Auditorium Theatre hosts a wide range of companies during a typical season, from smaller local companies to the Joffrey to prestigious international companies on tour.
Yntema started doing research at her kitchen table. “And the more questions I asked,” she said, “the more ridiculous the answers became.”
Yntema, who’s not a dancer or choreographer — though she danced as a child until she was about 13 — couldn’t find anyone else who was tracking the data she wanted to track, so she launched the Dance Data Project in 2015.
“I’m this housewife from Winnetka,” she said. “And I’ve literally heard over and over again, who are you?”
The data project collects information about companies’ seasons from their websites, through news releases, and sometimes on social media, then verifies its findings with companies who agree to do so. The data project shows that, despite recent improvement, works performed by major ballet companies are still overwhelmingly choreographed by men.
“I think it’s really important to be collecting this data because it keeps people honest,” Oliver said. “People may think they’re doing a good job of representing women in their season, but even if they have an evening of all women’s work — because that’s the only time they showcase women’s choreography — and they perform six different shows a year, then that’s not good enough.”
Even if you look on companies’ websites, or their social media accounts, Yntema said, images of the woman as ballerina are plentiful, but “it’s the men that are sitting on stools, holding a microphone, in street clothes, speaking as the experts.”
Penny Saunders is a Utah-based contemporary choreographer who has made work for Hubbard Street, where she used to dance, the Royal New Zealand Ballet, Tulsa Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet and more. She noted that in the worlds of contemporary and modern dance, where she works, there’s more equality in terms of who is running things at the front of the room.
That’s backed up by the data project’s research; in a recent report, it found that of the 50 largest contemporary and modern dance companies in the United States, half were helmed by women.
But in ballet, Saunders said, boys “start out being the only boy in class, but they end up being the only leader in the room, too, making all the choices for all the female assistants.”
Boys in ballet, Yntema says, are treated like “little princes.”
And then there is the money.
Yntema said that as companies lose audiences, they focus on programming to their biggest donors. Those donors tend to be older and conservative, she said. And there is a conception more broadly that audiences will come in for the classics, or for the new works of the best-known choreographers. So companies continue to go with the safe choices.
The data project found that in 2020-2021, the most widely programmed choreographers across the 50 largest companies were Balanchine and Marius Petipa, a man known for choreographing 19th century classics like “Giselle,” “The Sleeping Beauty” and “Swan Lake.” Petipa died in 1910.
Saunders said she thinks audiences would be happier if they saw things onstage they didn’t already recognize; if they left the theater “not having seen the Nutcracker for the 12th time.”
“We end up telling the same narrow stories year after year, because we can’t afford to take the risk of telling new ones,” she said.
“The problem is,” Yntema said, “eventually, I think it’s going to become a self-defeating strategy.”
Eduardo Vilaro, the artistic director of Ballet Hispánico — and the person who first commissioned a work from Martinez at Luna Negra — links the lack of racial and gender equity in ballet to the art form’s earliest roots in the court of Louis XIV, who ruled France from 1643 to 1715.
“Dance fits into this hierarchical supremacy,” he said, “because it was born out of it.”
To move forward, work by women and people of color has to be supported by the rest of the dance ecosystem, Vilaro said. That means their choreography needs to be taught in schools, and, particularly for work by and about people of color, be evaluated by critics who have the cultural context with which to understand it.
Balanchine and Petipa are “historical, very important figures in the canon of who we became as American dance. There’s no doubt about that. You cannot take that away,” said Vilaro. “We just have to show the world that there’s much more than that, and that their work is not the end-all and of-all of what really good work is.”
Disparities in pay
Rena Butler has always been fascinated by choreography. As a child growing up in Chicago, she and her family would clean the house on Saturdays with the TV show “Soul Train” blasting in the background. Butler loved watching dancers create their own movements as they went down the “Soul Train Line.” Another childhood favorite was the TV show “Making the Video,” an MTV show about pop stars creating their music videos. Sometimes she’d interject, her 7-year-old brain already strongly opinionated about what made a movement and what made a show.
“It was just so fascinating for me,” Butler said.
Butler is now a choreographic associate and dancer at Gibney Company in New York. Her choreographic repertoire includes BalletX, Hubbard Street and Boston Dance Theater. In 2019, she won a prestigious Princess Grace Award for her choreography.
As a choreographer, Butler said she’s made it a practice to check in with men who are her mentors and peers. Like other female choreographers, she has found that the opportunities afforded to men and women in the field often aren’t equal. She said she might find that although she and a male choreographer applied for the same opportunity, her male peer is offered the opportunity to make a longer piece. Or she’ll notice that even though they both have a piece appearing on the same program, the company will promote the man’s work more aggressively.
Numerous women said they weren’t paid equitably compared with male choreographers.
Mariana Oliveira, a Chicago-based choreographer whose work has been commissioned by the New York City Ballet Choreographic Institute, Joffrey Ballet Winning Works, Richmond Ballet and other companies, added that disparities in investment can affect funding for things like lighting or costumes, which influences the type of work a choreographer can create. Part of the problem, too, is that there often aren’t other female choreographers around to share notes.
“Very few moments in my career I’ve had the chance to sit down with another female choreographer and chat about the issues we had,” she said.
In her own work, Oliveira said, she tries to put women in positions where they are in charge, where they are strong.
“The art is the art regardless of gender,” she said. “But it is different.”
As for Martinez, she’s in the beginning stages of putting together an evening of her own, with her dancers at PARA.MAR. It’ll premiere in Chicago next year. Because contracts have not yet been signed, she can’t share much about the choreographers she’s commissioned or the details of the program.
She can share the title of the work, though. It’s called “UNTOLD Stories.”
