Dance, Women in

Art Dance

Around the globe, the word dance conjures up images of art-dance. By definition, dance is a Western term and its actions promote Western cultural values, even when the dances occur in non-Western locations. Ballet is the most well-regarded Western dance form, reflecting through both its management and its choreographies, the place of women in the Western culture. Ballet poses questions of elitism, control, power, authority, and ownership, which also are part of the dance world's politics. Western art dance has been a feminized culture since the mid-19th century, with economic, institutional, and artistic power held primarily by men. However, a gradual shift is occurring as some women are integrating into the power élite as artistic directors (e.g., Paris Opera, Royal Ballet, the Alvin Ailey Company, and a few mid-level U.S. ballet companies). They're also penetrating the ranks of executive directors (e.g., American Ballet Theatre) and as the directors of major training academies. Few women have been successful as choreographers in the ballet tradition, but many are artistic directors and choreographers in modern and contemporary companies and in regional ballet organizations. It is notable that the male-led companies tend to be far more successful financially than those led by women.

In recent years, dance practices have been exposed and encouraged across creative and cultural lines. Thus, pioneers from Dawn Stoppiello (Troika Ranch) to Trisha Brown have been wowing audiences with dance invention. While there is a cultural bias toward men in technology fields-one that is supported by high-profile men like Ed Roberts, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs-that bias doesn't translate to dance, dance technology, and other creative arts.

There has been an exchange between and among local and global practices in art-dance. The availability of new technologies supports Internet and new media studies. Recent technology has made available and affordable both travel to other cultures and recording devices such as flip videos in ways that were not imagined 50 years ago. Thus, a 30-year-old American [Page 373]dance artist can visit Indonesia for four months and incorporate appropriate Balinese kecak dance movement into her personal movement vocabulary. This form of cultural assimilation, transmission, migration, or contamination (depending on one's point of view), is sometimes labeled fusion, and is both welcomed and resisted by different artists and audiences.

Technological availability also has exposed the methods women choreographers are using to create new ideas (e.g., X-ray machines, projectors, videos, movies clips, live technology experience), and has resulted in new digital choreographies, as evidenced in the work of Norah Zuniga Shaw.

Women have flourished in the professions of dance education. Two main factors have influenced the burgeoning of artist/educators: the increase in consciousness around bodily-kinesthetic activities in general and the decrease in funding for “art-dance” outside of education. While there are earlier success stories, such as Margaret H'Doubler, dance entered the U.S. college and university setting en masse in the late 1960s and early 1970s at the height of social protest movements (including the women's rights movement), and refined its idea of “research” to align with other university studies. This move has given rise to a category called artist-educators, predominantly female dance professors who dance and teach. This change gave the artist-educators a voice, location and income for their art work. Ironically, since both dance and education have been highly populated by women, the smaller number of men who value dance education as a professional choice are often hired more readily than women, helping to gender-balance department faculty.

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