A Sports Analogy

[Helene]

We keep asking, where are the female, black, and brown choreographers, artistic directors, and artistic staff?  Where are the black and brown dancers?

I think this analogy from sports is on target.

For context:  Steve Nash was an NBA star basketball player, and he's just been given the head coach position for the NBA team, the Nets.  Zito Madu, a former writer for the sports site SB Nation, and now a freelance writer, tweeted about this appointment, which has stirred a lot of discussion, especially in this moment, starting here: emphasis mine):

Quote

 

It's weird that it keeps happening across numerous sports where some people can walk into head coaching positions with little to no experience, yet others are told that they must prove themselves for years as scouts/assistants/coaching lower teams, before getting an interview.

I'm going to add here that pretending that this is a problem that comes to individual cases is silly. On each case, you can find a reasonable angle to justify it. But then when you pull back and see the disparity, you can then say it's all reasonable or that there's a problem.

The problem isn't Steve Nash in particular. That's the thinking of a child. The problem is the structure that makes a case like his possible, while having very different requirements for others who have the same pedigree and more experience than him.

Because when you look at the full picture of it and the clear disparity, the only way you can justify it is by going into individual cases and exceptionalism. And pretending that there will be a perfect case needed to "prove" that the problem exists.

 

 

[On Pointe]

While there are similar elements in sports and the arts,  there is one glaring difference - the majority of the players in the NBA and the NFL are black and highly-valued as players.  That's why the disparity as to who gets coaching and management positions is so obvious.  But in ballet in particular,  there are far fewer black professionals performing in any capacity,  so there is plausible deniability as to why so few make it into companies and/or teaching and management positions.  The appointment of Aesha Ash to the faculty at SAB and Craig Hall's continuing tenure as ballet master at NYCB are the exceptions that prove the rule.

[Helene]

Analogous does not mean identical, and I certainly wouldn't argue identical in every way.  Ballet would be financially thriving if it had a percentage point of the money that is poured into and extracted out of professional and collegiate sports. 

The main difference I see is transparency:  the entire development and selection process in professional sports is public from the time athletes are children, while for ballet, it's almost entirely behind closed doors, and that is why there appears to be more plausible deniability.  Artistic directors can claim that there are no black and brown dancers in the development pipeline, while there is a long tradition of black ballet schools and teachers whose students have been uniquely ignored by the traditional ballet establishment and companies, at least in North America.   All of which is unseen and/or brushed aside, even when their students have thriving careers in Europe at companies as prestigious. 

In sports crowds watch young players, from youth leagues to high school teams to college teams to professional drafts to professional teams.  The talent is out there for everyone to see, he pressure from the fanbase and TV audience is to produce winning product, and there are millions to tell every coach and GM/athletic director what he -- almost always he -- is doing wrong..  Yet, even at the athlete level,  there is plenty of plausible deniability for choosing and playing or not choosing and playing any individual athlete -- too short, too tall, too muscular, not muscular enough, not a smart player, too error prone, a ball hog, not a team player, even if there are patterns for to whom this is applied and for whom there are exceptions. The dollar pressure in sports sometimes wins, until you get to management or hiring quarterbacks, because because.  The entire training process, particularly in football, silos players into different positions when young, based on the "assessments" of ability and intelligence.

Many of the qualities that would translate to coaching are often clear from the court or field, especially in basketball and, additionally from interviews, which are ubiquitous in professional and common in college sports.  Even casual fans can see who is managing from the basketball court. Serious fans and experts point out regularly who is the key to success and who makes their teammates better.  You can find scores of interviews and commentary about how one athlete is a true leader in the clubhouse, and how a team will suffer because they lost that athlete from the locker room, and who has respect for whom, and now, individual athletes' own voices are amplified on social media and not gated by a press corps.  In ballet, there is the occasional "He is the partner of choice" and "We all love her," the latter most often when a dancer retires, and there is no visible correlation between a dancer's stage performance and his or her ability to lead anything.  That's all out of public eye, and the end result for choosing artistic directors and often artistic staff is almost always a male former principal dancer, even if female former principal dancers of qualify sometimes far outnumber former male principal dancers. 

The NFL will argue on money terms that their fans won't accept a black head coach, a black quarterback, a black offensive coordinator, a black GM.  The NBA doesn't claims as much, and, yet, there is always the individual argument for why Steve Nash is the right choice for the Nets because he has that intangible something to lead men, create alchemy, produce a winner, and assure the fans that he knows what he's doing.  Just as there are always individual arguments for choosing dancers from the development pipeline and rarely hiring from among the few black and brown ballet dancers who have had careers for management positions.  I heard some of the Forsythe's former Frankfurt contingent speak as part of the MOBBallet online symposium last weekend: they haven't gone anywhere, and they are a fraction.

 

[volcanohunter]

32 minutes ago, Helene said:

...there is no visible correlation between a dancer's stage performance and his or her ability to lead anything.  That's all out of public eye, and the end result for choosing artistic directors and often artistic staff is almost always a male former principal dancer, even if female former principal dancers of qualify sometimes far outnumber former male principal dancers. 

Articles like this by writers who ought to know better don't help. 

"What happens to male ballet greats when they retire?"

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-happens-to-male-ballet-greats-when-they-retire-

Why male?!! 

 

[pherank]

4 hours ago, volcanohunter said:

Articles like this by writers who ought to know better don't help. 

"What happens to male ballet greats when they retire?"

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-happens-to-male-ballet-greats-when-they-retire-

Why male?!! 

Perhaps Ismene Brown's article should have been titled, "Of Hunks and Gods"

There's a lot of worshiping at the altar going on here:
"...but that’s 15 already who qualify as (as the critic Alastair Macaulay once vividly listed) heroes, poets, gods, dreamboats and hunks"

I agree that the question should be, "What happens to ballet greats when they retire? (independent of sexual affiliation/gender identity). But there's no clear path to advancement into management, and plainly not all dancers have the vision, managements skills, people skills and charisma to run companies successfully.

Young dancers often seem to think the A.D. job in particular is all about choosing ballets/dance projects and casting (what fun!). But at many companies the job is often bureaucratic and necessarily oriented towards fund-raising. There isn't always other senior mangers to take on all the "dry" business of running a company - some A.D.'s easily spend as much of their time playing Personnel Director, or Fund Raiser, as they do Artistic Director. Of course the largest companies tend to have big bureaucracies to divide up the various managerial tasks and responsibilities. In theory, that gives the A.D. more time to be "artistic". Or maybe they just feel they have less say over company issues...

Edited September 4, 2020 by pherank

[On Pointe]

52 minutes ago, pherank said:

Young dancers often seem to think the A.D. job in particular is all about choosing ballets/dance projects and casting (what fun!). But at many companies the job is often bureaucratic and necessarily oriented towards fund-raising. There isn't always other senior mangers to take on all the "dry" business of running a company - some A.D.'s easily spend as much of their time playing Personnel Director, or Fund Raiser, as they do Artistic Director.

 

Peter Martins was perhaps problematic in some aspects of running NYCB,  but he excelled in raising money and schmoozing board members and potential donors. 

An Instagram video of a young Nigerian ballet student dancing barefoot in the rain went viral last month,  with wonderful results.  He's been offered scholarships in New York,  and the school has received help in bettering their facility.  Here's an article about it from The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/sep/04/poise-and-prestige-the-lagos-ballet-class-propelled-onto-global-stage

While they concentrate on Anthony Madu,  the boy in the video,  to my mind they buried the lede - the ballet teacher,  Daniel Ajala,  taught himself ballet from YouTube videos!  To bring it back to sports,  this is akin to Richard Williams coaching his daughters Venus and Serena to tennis greatness even though he did not play the game himself.  He taught them using what he learned from videotapes and books.  His example inspired Leonard François,  the father of Naomi Osaka.  Tennis training,  like ballet,  is very expensive,  but where there's a will there's a way.

[Helene]

Figure skating in China was developed by several men who interpreted Soviet tapes and created a training regimen based on them.  They were the ones who coached Yao Bin and his partner Luan Bo, who were laughed at by the crowd in Dortmund when they competed at a World Championships there.  (I've seen the tape, and that laughter was unfounded.  I've seen a much, much lower level at European and Worlds Championships in the last few decades before the International Skating Union instituted technical minimums for championships.)

Yao Bin coached World and Olympic Champions Shen and Zhao, and World and Olympic medallists Pang and Tong (on and off) and D. Zhang and H. Zhang.  He co-coached World Champions and Olympic medallists Sui and Hand and H. Zhang with at least his first new partner, along with co-coaches Shen and Zhao until retiring,  He created the modern Chinese Pairs program based on the work his coaches did from video.

North Korean skaters have not only been taught by coaches from videotape, but have been self-taught from video.  There was a wonderful skater at the Vancouver Olympics , Ri Song Choi, who, because he had no seeding points, skated first and just missed the cut-off for the free skate by less than a point.  Had he skated later, he would likely have made the final, as scores trend higher, even for the same or lesser quality.  I remember that he was the talk of the group of us who met on the corridor during zamboni breaks.