David Lyman

Special to Cincinnati Enquirer

“The numbers are shocking,” says Elizabeth Yntema, founder and president of the Chicago-based Dance Data Project.

She’s talking about the lack of female choreographers in America’s ballet companies.

"We’ve been talking about this for years,” says Yntema, “but almost nothing has changed.”

Consider these numbers, which Yntema shared in a pair of presentations at the recent annual conference of Dance/USA, the national service organization for professional dance. Analyzing statistics from the nation’s top 50 ballet companies, she found that:

• 81 percent of all ballets scheduled for the 2019-2020 season are created by men. (The number is even higher – 85 percent – for full-length ballets.)

• 64 percent of all ballet programs during the 2019-2020 season feature only male choreographers.

• Just 12 of the nation’s top 50 ballet companies have female artistic directors.

One of the rare exceptions to all of this, she points out, is Cincinnati Ballet, where artistic director Victoria Morgan has championed the works of female choreographers for more than a decade.

According to the DDP report:

• 56 percent of the works Cincinnati Ballet commissioned for the 2019-2020 season are created by women.

• Female choreographers will be featured in 71 percent of Cincinnati Ballet's programs.

• The nation's top 50 ballet companies will present 13 programs that feature exclusively female choreography during the 2019-2020 season. Eleven of those are full-length ballets, with two of that 11 commissioned or co-commissioned by Cincinnati Ballet.

Cincinnati Ballet isn’t completely alone. Yntema’s study noted a handful of other companies, most notably Sacramento Ballet – led by Cincinnatian Amy Seiwert – and Philadelphia’s Ballet X.

“But for the most part, you’re seeing very little progress from the largest companies,” she says. “What makes all this worse is that critics from the largest publications almost never see these other companies. Traditional journalism has been cut, so there is this massive disconnect between the biggest cities and the work that is being done in the rest of the country, particularly the ones being led by women. Often, they don’t get reviewed, so they’re invisible to the rest of the world.”

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In Yntema’s experience, some of the more adventurous and innovative work being generated today comes from these regional companies. Unfortunately, choreographic gender-equity is often lost there, too.

While the Cincinnati Ballet’s 2019-2020 season has an even balance between male and female choreographers, the region’s other medium-sized companies are woefully lacking in works by women.

At BalletMet in Columbus, the 2019-2020 season features 10 works – just two by women. The figures are nearly the same at the Louisville Ballet, where just one of nine works is choreographed by a woman. Over at Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, just one of 11 works will be created by a woman.

“It’s dismal,” says Yntema, whose presentations covered a wide range of topics, from images in marketing to arts funding to ways to reshape the ballet curriculum.

You can read more of DDP’s research at its web site, www.dancedataproject.com.