{"id":638,"date":"2018-02-27T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-28T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/supplychainstrategynow.com\/?p=638"},"modified":"2025-06-11T10:10:06","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T10:10:06","slug":"how-kate-ladenheims-new-video-series-tackles-womens-internalized-misogyny-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/supplychainstrategynow.com\/index.php\/2018\/02\/27\/how-kate-ladenheims-new-video-series-tackles-womens-internalized-misogyny-2\/","title":{"rendered":"How Kate Ladenheim’s New Video Series Tackles Women’s Internalized Misogyny"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIt\u2019s a standalone dance film series, a nuanced examination of contemporary feminism and an evocative teaser trailer for an upcoming performance\u2014it wouldn\u2019t be a project by Kate Ladenheim<\/a>, artistic director of The People Movers<\/a> and one of our \u201c25 to Watch,\u201d if it wasn\u2019t daringly ambitious. Glass<\/a> <\/em>is the multi-hyphenate\u2019s latest creation, a four-pronged project about women living under glass ceilings that, in its most widely accessible form, is a five-part video series, the third installment of which was released today. <\/em>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat are the double standards that come into play when women try to break glass ceilings? What is the backlash when they fail? What happens when they stand together in solidarity, or when they unintentionally perpetuate misogyny? These are some of the questions the film series asks as four dancers protest in pantsuits, conform in deconstructed hoop skirts and pause to paint their nails. We caught up with Ladenheim to discuss the ongoing project.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tWhat is
\n\t\tGlass<\/em>?<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are four main forms: a five part series of online films, a film and performance installation, a live performance and a dialogue series. My original idea was that I would build a glass ceiling that an audience would stand on and look down on a community of women. But it\u2019s really expensive to build a glass ceiling! And difficult, and dangerous if you don\u2019t do it correctly. We had to find ways around this idea and expressing this inescapable hierarchy women experience collectively. It\u2019s about how you internalize patriarchy against yourself and fellow female identified folk without realizing it when you\u2019re inside that pressure cooker environment.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat led you to create both a video series and a live performance?<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tThere is a stage that everybody looks at all the time, and it\u2019s your phone or computer. There\u2019s something essential about live work, but also about how live and reactive digital spaces have become. If you\u2019re talking about something so reactive as these topics around women and feminism, you need to be there, online. This is a theme in my work in general: the way live and digital work interfaces, and how dance can exist in digital spaces and how that impacts liveness in general. The story can be told in many ways. I don\u2019t really have delusions about myself as an independent dancemaker: My reach isn\u2019t that big, but I like to provide platforms for engagement in a number of different ways.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat is the relationship between the video series and the concert work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\t\tIn live work, there\u2019s a way to build tension. You can be more patient with your work in live spaces than in digital spaces, because in digital spaces people get bored. A lot of my pieces are a slow burn, and about things bubbling up inside you and trying to keep it all in. All humans can feel that, but especially women in professional settings where you don\u2019t always feel you can speak up. So in these films, how do we get that feeling without staying in the same place for too long?<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhere did the idea for
\n\t\t\tGlass <\/em><\/strong>come from?<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tI started building the base material in 2015. I had a residency with a composer\u2014Peter Van Zandt Lane\u2014that took place at The Pocantico Center, the former private residence of the Rockefellers. It\u2019s this lavish property, and there are beautiful gardens, but everything is protected by gates. By the end of the week we had the idea that we would make something around the ideas of barriers and gates. And then the 2016 election happened, and the truly disturbing and overt and horrifying displays of misogyny that were plastered throughout this campaign. Hillary Clinton is a woman who is so privileged in every sense, and to have her constantly slandered for her femaleness was really shocking for me. The thought that you can work your entire life for something, be qualified in every sense of the word and just not achieve it because of your woman-ness\u2014that hit me very hard. That\u2019s a barrier everyone can see past but you can\u2019t get through. So this piece was born.\n<\/p>\n

\t
\n\t \u201cThere are all these skeletons of perceived femininity in the work,\u201d Kate Ladenheim says of Glass. Photo by Whitney Browne courtesy Ladenheim<\/small>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tThe costuming choices across the video series so far have been very evocative\u2014pantsuits, deconstructed hoop skirts. How did you arrive at these choices?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\t\tThe pantsuits pretty directly referenced white pantsuits and political movements and women\u2019s suffrage. The hoop skirts reference restrictive costuming for women that has been throughout the ages. Also, one of the essays by Rebecca Solnit that was inspirational to me was about silence as a series of concentric circles<\/a>; basically, how silence works as an oppressive tool to keep people from believing women and to keep violence against them invisible. Looked at from above, <\/strong>women in hoop skirts are constrained inside of concentric circles. They stay in the hoop skirts in the rest of the films. They become obstacles: It\u2019s harder to get close to people, you get stuck in them.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\tWhat about the nail painting that is so instrumental to
\n\t\tGlass: Part III<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tThere are all these skeletons of perceived femininity within the work: nail painting and hoop skirts and leotards and nakedness. They all kind of reference these things that women can reclaim for themselves. My mom would get her nails painted every week when I was growing up. I was never really into nail polish. It made me feel overindulgent, ostentatious; even though it\u2019s such a tiny thing, it made me feel like I was attracting too much attention. But it\u2019s something that my mother and a lot of other women reclaim as something that makes them powerful and fierce and sexy\u2014but it\u2019s created by men, with the male gaze in mind. And you can\u2019t do as many things as first when the nails are wet; it affects your physicality in a very specific way. To research for the piece we would paint our nails and do the movement while they were wet to see how it affects our approach.<\/del><\/strong>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tSomething I\u2019ve really appreciated about this series is how nuanced the ideas feel. It\u2019s not just women in solidarity with each other to crush the patriarchy, or, on the other extreme, women putting down or holding back other women.<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s something I\u2019ve been interested in while watching the discourse around feminism becoming more prominent: Who gets to claim feminism? Nobody is a perfect activist; there is no such thing as an ideal woman. Everyone is trying to become a better person, and I think that\u2019s what the women in Glass<\/em> are trying to do. Within this structure, how do they relate to each other, the world around each other, express their feelings? It\u2019s not always kind. I don\u2019t think anyone in this world can say someone came to me with a story and I had the perfect reaction, or I gave them the perfect comfort. So there are nuances to the way we treat each other. There are faults to our discourse. There are faults to our attempts at liberation.\n<\/p>\n

\t
\n\t Still from Glass: Part I. Photo by Chelsea Robin Lee, Courtesy The People Movers<\/small>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tHas your perspective on this series changed at all in light of the #MeToo movement?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\t\tI don\u2019t think it was anything that I didn\u2019t know before it came to light. Of course I know that abuse is rampant. Every woman and queer person that I know has a story around harassment and abuse. So I guess it\u2019s galvanizing to see things coming to the forefront, and it\u2019s exciting to be creating topical work, but I\u2019m not sure that it changed our approach in any way. It was like, Great, everyone caught up!\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\tHow do you go about creating a feminist working environment in the studio?<\/strong>\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\tWe\u2019re cautious to care for each other. We started with agreements about safety and what I will ask of them and what they can say no to. We all really care about and value consent. I can\u2019t really take credit for that one. I just have the most amazing collaborators, these incredible women: generous, smart, and capable, and really willing to engage on every level. They\u2019re honest and open and I don\u2019t know that it\u2019s me that\u2019s doing it! It\u2019s us<\/em> that\u2019s done it.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\tIt\u2019s so funny because there\u2019s so much violence and pettiness and passive aggression in the work, but if you saw us you\u2019d never believe we could do that to each other because there\u2019s so much love and care and admiration between us. I\u2019m so honored they work with me! That they think I\u2019m worthy!\n\t<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

The post How Kate Ladenheim’s New Video Series Tackles Women’s Internalized Misogyny<\/a> appeared first on Dance Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a standalone dance film series, a nuanced examination of contemporary feminism and an evocative teaser trailer for an upcoming performance\u2014it wouldn\u2019t be a project by Kate Ladenheim, artistic director of The People Movers and one of our \u201c25 to Watch,\u201d if it wasn\u2019t daringly ambitious. Glass is the multi-hyphenate\u2019s latest creation, a four-pronged project […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":659,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/supplychainstrategynow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/supplychainstrategynow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/supplychainstrategynow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supplychainstrategynow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supplychainstrategynow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=638"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/supplychainstrategynow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":661,"href":"https:\/\/supplychainstrategynow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/638\/revisions\/661"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supplychainstrategynow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/supplychainstrategynow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supplychainstrategynow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supplychainstrategynow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}