A friend posted this on Facebook the other day.

I understand that it’s a cinematic tool, but I couldn’t help but wonder: how well does contemporary theatre hold up against the Bechdel test?  In some ways, it’s a difficult test to impose.  There are a lot more one-woman plays than one-woman films, after all.   Still, an interesting lens for looking at the works of Shakespeare, Moliere, and Ibsen, all of whom have female leads…but what kind of females are they?

I think contemporary theatre has more luck passing the test.  How many contemporary plays can you think of that pass the test?  Here are a few, off the top of my head:

• Unity (1918) by Kevin Kerr
• Marion Bridge by Daniel MacIvor
• The Attic, the Pearls, and Three Fine Girls and More Fine Girls
• This is For You, Anna by The Anna Project
• Proof by David Auburn
• Doubt by John Patrick Shanley (sort of…they talk about the priest a lot)
• Wit by Margaret Edson
• Les Belles Soeurs by Michel Tremblay
• Albertine in Five Times by Michel Tremblay
• The Rez Sisters by Tomson Highway
• Ernestine Shuswap Gets Her Trout by Tomson Highway
• Perfect Pie by Judith Thompson

Can you add to the list?

Check out Drama, Daily’s list of female theatre bloggers.   There are some really cool people on this list!

http://dramadaily.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/the-wtb/

After posting Lindsay Schwietz’s article on the 2008/09 results of the Equity in Canadian Theatre study, I couldn’t help but wonder how Alberta and Calgary stood up against the national averages.  With the (albeit recent) appointment of Vanessa Porteous to the helm of ATP, Pamela Halstead at Lunchbox, and Nikki Loach at Quest, I’d like to believe Calgary could be a leader in (dare I say it) progressive hiring practices…unbelievable that hiring deserving women to positions of power could still be the definition of “progressive hiring.”

I emailed Nightwood Theatre in Toronto (the pioneering feminist theatre company that partnered with PACT and the PGC for the 2006 Equitiy in Canadian Theatre Study) and they kindly emailed me the results of the 2008-09 straw poll.  For the record, I love Nightwood.  The current team of Artistic Director Kelly Thornton and Producer Monica Esteves have been doing some amazing work over the past few years.  In addition to their active efforts to support female artists, they’ve been producing some rock awesome art.  I had the good fortune to see Sonja Mills’ The Danish Play last time I was in TO, and can’t wait to return to see what they’re up to.

Okay, so on to the figures.

The following are the results of the straw poll from the 2008/09 Season.  Out of 139 PACT member theatres, 141 completed the poll.  Here are the national findings, also posted in Lindsay’s post on Praxis:

And where does Alberta rest in these figures?  Well we’ve been lumped in with the territories, but I only know of one PACT company up there, Nakai Theatre in the Yukon.  I think it is probably safe to say this poll is largely of Albertan companies.  First, let’s look at Artistic Directors of PACT Companies.  Note that the y axis on all of the following charts represent % of artists, not the actual numbers.

Now playwrights:

And the directors:

But which kinds of companies are led by whom? Here’s a breakdown divided by male and female Artistic Directors, playwrights, and directors:

What does this all mean for Calgary?

Here’s a quote from the 2006 study, which seems to still be relevant today.

Men are particularly hired as ADs, directors and playwrights in greater numbers than women at the larger, more established theatres, whereas women are found in greater numbers at smaller companies with modest to mid-size budgets.

…Companies with female ADS have a higher incidence of TYA activities, production tours, and use of non-traditional venues than companies with male ADS.

~Rebecca Burton.  Adding it Up: The Status of Women in Canadian Theatre

If we assume this to be true today, then what might Calgary’s bar graph look like once we include the non-PACT companies in Calgary into the study, those that would not have reported for the 2008-09 study?  Could the small companies led by women help balance the scales?

Let’s consider the following companies: Theatre Calgary, Ghost River, Sage, Ground Zero, Downstage, Vertigo, OYR, CYPT, Theatre Junction, Shakespeare in the Park, the Old Trouts, Forte Musical Theatre Guild, and Theatre Encounter are all led by male ADs.  Meanwhile ATP, Lunchbox, Urban Curvz, Quest, Evergreen, The Shakespeare Company, W.P. Puppet, Centre Stage, and our very own Verb theatre have female ADs.  Green Fools has one male and one female AD.  Those lists are by no means exhaustive (just off the top of my head – I am sure there are more that I’m forgetting), and some are semi-professional, but they do give an idea of the size of companies led by male and female ADs in this city.   With 10 female ADs and 19 male ADs on that hastily compiled list, the bar graph looks a little like this:

As for directors and playwrights, in addition to the fact that it would take weeks to even begin a study of that magnitude for the 2009/10 season, I believe you would need data from at least two or three seasons to get a fair sampling.

The question I always ask when looking at these numbers is simple: on average, do male ADs program seasons of plays written by men?  Do they hire more male directors to direct those plays?  And if so, why? How about females?  I’ve often heard this question answered in the following way:  ”Bill is the AD of Company X. Since Bill is attracted to stories and plays that engage him, and the stories that engage him are partly determined by gender voice, Bill is more likely to connect with a play written by Tim than by Judy.  And who should Bill hire to direct Tim’s play?  Who better than Fred?”    This theory suggests that gender inequity may start with the AD.   The difficulty is that it doesn’t seem to work quite the same with with female ADs.  Though female ADs on average produce more female playwrights than male ADs do, they still produce more male playwrights than female playwrights overall.  Female ADs DO seem to hire more female directors than male directors, though…. This is from the national findings of the 2006 study:

While companies with female ADs produce female playwrights 38% of the time on average, companies with male ADs do so only 24% of the time. Conversely, companies with male ADs produce work by men 76% of the time on average, while companies with female ADs stage work by men 62% of the time.

Women directed 34% of the staged productions overall, men directed the other 66%, and people of colour directed not quite 6% of the plays (less than 3% for each gender). Companies run by men hired female directors 24% of the time,whereas companies run by women hired female directors 55% of the time.

~Rebecca Burton.  Adding it Up: The Status of Women in Canadian Theatre

What does this all mean?  …I don’t know  …Affirmative action?  Any university drama professor will tell you their classes are usually 80% female, so there certainly shouldn’t be a lack of available artists, right?  For now, I suppose it means we have to keep an eye on it. I’ve heard recently that the Canada Council for the Arts will, for the first time since the 1990s, require companies to report gender statistics.  As a major granting organization, they have the ability to reward companies for making efforts to bring a little more balance to those bar graphs.  Maybe it’s not the best way to bring about change, but if it helps…

Thanks again to the Nightwood folks for providing the data.

Thanks to the folks at Praxis for this:

__________________________________________________________________

Women making and attending theatre up.Women in charge of theatre still down.

by Lindsay Schwietz

When Rina Fratticelli’s report came out in 1982 revealing the amount of women in power positions in Canadian theatre to be shockingly low, the gender inequality issue was exposed.  Yet, twenty-seven years later the PACT Equity in Canadian Theatre report on gender shows that very little has changed.  In PACT theatres in the 2008-2009 season, women accounted for 29% of the artistic directors, 36% of the working directors and 29% of the produced playwrights.  Primarily men are still running theatre companies across Canada. And the larger the theatre company, the less women in artistic leadership positions.

This is true despite the fact that there are more women in theatre schools and more women in audiences.  According to the same report, almost 60% of the theatre-going audience in Canada is thought to be female and women account for 68% of student enrolment in the performing arts, communication and technologies fields.  Yet, these percentages don’t match the employment opportunities for women.

Why is this happening?  Why has very little changed in over twenty years?  And what is being done about it?  Are we going to be looking at these same statistics twenty years from now?

Kelly Thornton is Artistic Director of Nightwood Theatre, and co-head of the national advisory committee of Equity in Canadian Theatre: The Women’s Initiative, a group of activists whose aim is to formally investigate the status of women in Canadian theatre and develop plans to change existing barriers.  She believes the lack of females is not something done on purpose, but created through subconscious choices by the male artistic directors that run 71% of the theatres in Canada.

“I don’t think they’re actually saying ‘we’ve got to keep women out’ – I just think there is a gender bias to the way we program seasons.  I always use the analogy of a man and a woman walk into a bookstore.  The two will both buy a novel and they will come out with totally different novels.  And it’s based on their gender.  Think of a male and a female AD – they’re gravitating towards stories that speak to them.  And often that has to do with gender.”…

Click here to read the rest of this article on the Praxis Theatre blog.