Choreography

The statistics for choreographers (male and female)

I have been researching about choreography and came accross a book, Fifty Contemporary Choreographers edited by Martha Bremse, and it is basically facts and information about the big contemporary choreographersrs in the world. It is very interesting to see how many of them is male choreographers and how many is female. I counted and there was 33 male and only 17 female choreographers in total. I wanted to see if it’s actually true what they say with ”male choreographers are more successfully than female choreographers.” Why is that?

I found a dance history essay written at London Contemporary Dance school, May 2000, by Hallvord Reiar Michaelsen Steen, http://www.hallvord.com/dance/mfchoreog.en.htm.

He writes about just exact this issue. He wanted to see if it’s actually true when you look into the facts about contemporary choreographers (in the UK). He researched on loads of different companies and at the end he says ”The more established a company is the less it pays attention to gender issues. ” But you can see that there is a more even balance among less established dance companies. Why is that? Is it because the bigger and successful you get people doesn’t care because they get all the good attention and the statistics doesn’t matter anymore?

Contemporary dance is still dominated by male choreographers. But this issue is only for contemporary dance and not so much Jazz, Musical theatre, Commercial and Ballet dance.

I am not that bother about this issue. I feel like right now feminisim on social media and everything that has to do with statistic with male and females is bigger than it has to be. When it comes to choreography maybe the women are a bit more scared and laid back while the men is up your face and wants to be seen and succesful. I am not saying that women are cowards but maybe we should just start to take more place because we are as good as the men (if not even better ;)) People do say that it is harder for women than men to be successful in the dance world because there is more of us women that dance but that is just how it is.

I hope i haven’t defended anyone by saying how I feel about the male and female situation. I am only talking about the choreography world and not any other gender problems we have in our lifes. Dance and choreography deserves to be bigger and more important than it is now. We should therefore be proud of the big names out there no matter the gender. We all know how hard it is to be successful in the industry.