Female Representation in the Performing Arts

The issue of female representation in the performing arts has been spotlighted by several media sources in the last year – The Stage (the world’s longest running theatre publication) has, in the last few months, published articles which investigate the lack of female directors in Musical Theatre and the strategies being used to redress the balance.

One report highlights information released by the Musicians Union which showed that there were no female musical directors leading pit orchestras in the West End (previous reports also showed that 90% of musicians in the orchestras were men).

The library has a subscription to The Stage and you can find the latest issue in the Print Journal section.

The Guardian have been looking at the under-representation of female composers in concert line-ups. Figures that were compiled by the Donne – Women in Music project and Drama Musica show that 95% of concerts worldwide have music composed solely by men. These figures were taken from the 2018-19 programmes of 15 large orchestras across the world. Campaigners are arguing against those who claim that a male-dominated canon is inescapable.

Classic FM have also written about the absence of female composers in last year’s best score category at the Oscars - even in the shortlist of 141 scores, only five were by female composers.

Is anything changing?

In this short video from 2017, BBC Stories document the careers of Ruth Brill and Arielle Smith, two female choreographers who have paved the way for women to take leading roles in the performing arts.

The Stage have featured more positive reports of women playwrights who have recently received increased exposure in the West End. They have also credited the Royal Court for an increasingly diverse programme which has featured many more female writers and directors. In November, the RCS staged Troilus and Cressida, their first full-length Shakespeare play with a gender-balanced cast – music by Evelyn Glennie explored and challenged gender conventions within the play.

As a reaction to the current climate of empowerment and equality for women, Glasgow Citizens Theatre has announced a season of work for 2019 showcasing female writers and women working across Scotland. The productions will be directed by women and outreach work will also focus on women in the arts. More information about what is included in the season can be found here: https://www.citz.co.uk/

Within the library we have many female playwrights including Frances Poet, Cora Bissett, Liz Lochhead and also collections such as Contemporary Women Playwrights Into the 21st Century.

The soprano Gabriella Di Laccio has created a website called the Donne project as a space dedicated to female composers both historical and contemporary. The Strad has also reported that the BBC Proms are among more than 100 international festivals that have signed up to the PRS Foundation’s ‘Keychange’ pledge to achieve a 50:50 gender balance by 2022. They have also reported on other initiatives aimed redressing the balance.

You can read issues of The Strad in the library in the Print Journals section. The library also has books which critique the music canon such as De-canonizing music history and Gender and the musical canon.

Performing Arts, Whittaker-Library Style

From time to time we share interesting weblinks for our developing artists.

Like these from the Guardian's Culture Professionals blog :- 

• from the Guardian, Top Tips for your Acting CV
• Career Tips for Opera Singers 
• Disability arts: the challenge of ensuring creative momentum

Mindfulness for Performing Artists

Can Mindfulness Practice (specifically meditation) be used to enhance performance of actors/dancers/artists?

This was a discussion raised on ResearchGate, a forum for researchers to share their work and raise research questions.  Mindfulness can best be described as a kind of meditation; here's a blog about it:-

What can Mindfulness do for you?

What do you think?  Are you a performer?  Have you come across the concept of mindfulness, or some other form of meditation, in the context of your art - be it music, drama, dance or somewhere in between!

International Women's Day in the Performing Arts

'Whittaker', being a performing arts library, wishes to commemorate International Women's Day as it particularly affects the performing arts.  Do share any relevant links with us!

Here's the first - on the UN Women website, we find the One Woman Song.

Glasgow Women's Library is up early today with a blogpost by Magi.  (Not, admittedly, performing arts, but certainly women and libraries.)

The Musicians' Union posts details of the Women of the World music festival on Sunday 9th March, here.

Have you come across Women in Music? It's a national organisation: http://www.womeninmusic.org.uk/

There's also an International Alliance for Women in Music: 
http://iawm.org/




If you tweet, you might like to follow the #EverydaySexism hashtag, a project which was featured by the BBC a couple of days ago.

There's a London Concert for International Women's Day: the London Oriana Choir has a concert of music by women composers, at St Andrews Holborn tonight:-
http://www.londonoriana.com/current-season/

What's missing from this list?  Drama and theatre!  Please share any relevant links! 

India Today features TV star Toral Rasputra aka Anandi of Balika Vadhu, telling us what International Women's Day means to her. Read it here.

Meanwhile, Bollywood salutes the spirit of women, in the Indian Express today.  Here ...

At 9.45 pm on a Friday night, a good blogger doesn't just arbitrarily stop blogging.  Three cheers for the collective of researchers at the University of Sussex, who this evening notified me of their Reframing Activism blog.  Today they were highlighting the British Library's first oral history archive of the early days of feminism: Sisterhood and After.  Not content with one good blogpost today, they also hosted a guest blogpost by film-maker, actor and musician Jodi Nelson: Feminist Social Media Praxis. Jodi was asked a provocative question: "re_activism:What do you think the 21st century feminist looks likes?"

 

The Healthy Artist

• Vitamins?
• Gym subscription?
• Meditation?

I asked readers of this blog if there were particular subjects they'd like me to focus on this month.

'The healthy artist', came the reply. 

By which, they mean, healthy performing artist.

So here it is - my call for helpful, healthy websites - with the added twist that they must be relevant to performing artists.  I'm not going to start blogging about FitDay (though it's great) or Weightwatchers!

Here's a start: our books on health, and conversely, on injuries.  Why suffer for your art?!

Summertime - we're still here!

GREETINGS to Whittaker's followers!

A quick announcement:-

from OneBigTurn.blogspot.com

We've had the pre-graduation rush, and graduation itself, so now the Whittaker Library can settle into summertime routines.  (Summertime? Did someone mention summer?!)  There may be fewer library staff, but we still keep on going.

Our Whittaker Live blog will continue to bring you performing arts and study-related news whenever possible - do keep an eye on it.

For example, this week we've shared news of Jobs.ac,uk; digital literacy; oral history; theatre design; Scotland (Friends of Wighton/ Friends of Plockton/ Scottish storytelling); not to mention new library accessions; a call for papers from Organised Sound; and the fabulous Writing Britain exhibition at the British Library.  Scroll down to take a look.

If you'd like us to monitor particular themes/activities/events, do let us know. Email K.McAulay@rcs.ac.uk, or catch Karen on Twitter @Karenmca.

Writing a research proposal: the literature survey

Whether you call it a literature survey or a literature review ...

If you're writing a proposal for an undergraduate or postgraduate degree research project, these comments might help. 

(However, this is NOT about writing dozens of pages, describing scientific methods or submitting costings for a funding bid!)

So ... you've got an idea for a research project, and you've got to submit something in writing. 

• Have you established how much you are expected to write? 
• Do you have any indication how many citations you should come up with? 
• Have you been given any guidance about the currency of your citations?

The Whittaker Library supports staff and students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in their general studies and subject-specific research.  Our focus is the performing arts: music, drama, production, film, and dance.  If you were putting together a literature review for a scientific research project, you'd probably be much more concerned about currency.  (No point in outlining what you think is a cutting-edge piece of research, if the edge was metaphorically cut months or even years ago!)  That's not quite so crucial in our field.

The purpose of your literature review is to show that you know what's out there already.  The format of what you find (book, journal article, website etc) is not so important as the content.  Nonetheless, you'll make yourself look more convincing as a researcher if you show that you know about the most useful electronic resources.

The Whittaker Library offers a lot of subject-specific and more generic electronic resources.  What you need to do is three-fold:-

1. See what's in the Library catalogue - are there any key resources that you might use as a starting point?  (Or, indeed, that you think are so far off the mark that you wish to argue with?!)
2. Anyone can do a Copac library search, which will check all the UK national and university libraries at once. Zetoc is a good general resource, too.
3. See what a search of electronic resources comes up with.  Our library website has a page for ALL electronic resources (e-journals included); and another page for databases alone. 

If your research is going to be inter-disciplinary (eg combining music and drama), then the general searches are very important: you never know where your most likely sources will come from.  But don't forget to look at subject-specific bibliographic resources, too.  There are electronic abstracts and indexes especially for music, and especially for drama and dance.

How much time to spend?  Some people spend weeks, dipping in and out of resources before deciding what to include.  If you've got a limited amount of time, say a couple of hours, why not allocate half an hour to each of these three activities, then spend the last half-hour synthesising your findings and writing about what you've found?

Writing about what you've found is one thing; it's a good idea to put these resources in a neat, succinct bibliography, too.  That shows you understand the discipline of precise, accurate citation.  E.g.,

Atkinson, Charles M., The Critical Nexus: Tone-System, Mode, and Notation in Early Mediaeval Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Steyn, Carol, 'The Music Manuscripts of the Grey Collection in Cape Town and their European Connections', Fontes Vol.59 no.1 (2012), 45-56

Note that the first is a book; the second a journal article.  Bibliographies are in alphabetical order of author, but you describe books and journals slightly differently.

As soon as you start your research, you need to think much more deeply about bibliographies and ways of keeping track of your references.  But that's further down the line.

Good luck!

Where does it hurt? Performing Arts Medicine

A free online resource, drawn to our attention by Bibliolore -

Bibliography of Performing Arts Medicine

'Dedicated to the health of performing artists'

Many of Whittaker's followers are practising musicians, actors and dancers, and our books on injuries are often consulted!  This free online bibliography could be invaluable for practitioners and their teachers.

Why Whittaker Blogs

‘Whittaker’ had a few days of leave carried over from last year’s entitlement, so he’s taking a long weekend. But will ‘his’ readers survive without him? For anyone chancing upon this page, here are a few random but carefully-weighed comments.

So, why does Whittaker blog? To borrow Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s words, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”:-

• This blog is intended to inform staff and students of the performing arts.
• It aims to flag up useful and interesting websites, forthcoming events, new or rare library acquisitions, services offered by the library, and other sources of information, study, research or career support.
• Thus, this week it has offered readers details of a research symposium; old Scottish musicians and song collectors William Motherwell, William Tytler and Alexander Campbell; an arts and humanities streaming workshop; a Steve Reich 75th birthday competition; British Library Postgraduate Open Days; thoughts about a research query on the Lordship of the Isles; and the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival. Nothing if not varied!
• Our staff and students are musicians, actors, community arts animateurs, stage designers, film and television directors, jazz improvisers and ballet dancers, to name but a few.
• ‘Whittaker’ keeps a weather eye for interesting trends coming up on the Twitter scene, but ‘he’ will not be found on Facebook, as ‘he’ doesn’t care to discuss his private life on social media websites.  This is a professional blog.
• Meanwhile, the combination of upcoming cultural and information trends, with intriguing historical facts pertaining to old Scottish song collections, can be attributed to Whittaker’s own dual-qualified background in library & information science and musicology. He does try to seek out drama, film/television and ballet snippets, but depends on his informants to feed him interesting titbits in these spheres.
• The author of Whittaker does also occasionally contribute to other blogs such as TheThesisWhisperer, lurks around Twitter’s #PhDchat on Wednesday evenings, and authors the Jobs.ac.uk Music blog in 'his' spare time, to keep in touch with the world of research and offer support to those following him along the doctoral path.

If you like what you read here, please do comment. Any suggestions are always considered with an open mind.

Why do scholars blog?

Inger Mewburn, aka The Thesis Whisperer, runs a very successful research blog. (Do visit http://thethesiswhisperer.wordpress.com/.)  However, Inger also, from time to time, blogs elsewhere.  Today, 2nd September, I caught up with her on the Networked Researcher blog: her post is called Is there a new digital divide brewing?  It makes interesting reading.


"Whittaker" started asking "himself" why he maintains WhittakerLive.  Actually, it's all there on the sidebar:-

WhittakerLive has posted friendly and informative postings since 1999. We showcase performing arts websites, and higher education links that will interest our staff and student performers.


Current awareness: useful weblinks, publications, recordings, events etc. Also postings on learning skills, research support  and information literacy.

It's a wide remit, which is why the postings might seem rather random at first glance.  However, this week's postings are pretty representative of what we aim to achieve.  So, what have we got?  Obituaries for Ray Fisher (Scottish ballad singer) and Alasdair Gillies (bagpiper extraordinaire).  An 'on this day' posting for Joseph Ritson, an influential 18th century antiquarian. The name-change from RSAMD to Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.  Digitised Beethoven.  The first call for papers, for Musica Scotica 2012 conference.

Now, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is not just about Scottish music, or indeed about classical music or music history.  It's drama, dance, film and TV, performance and improvisation ... so please do suggest newsworthy items or websites that are of potential use to staff and students working in these areas!

Intute - what in the www is out there ...?

Have you come across Intute? If you're looking for reliable, subject-related information, it's a great place to start.

• Intute - Arts and Humanities - Music & Performing Arts
• Intute homepage

Here's how the Music and Performing Arts resource describes itself:-

In combining the resources and services of these hubs, the Arts and Humanities service of Intute offers an easy-to-use and powerful tool for discovering the best Internet resources for education and research in Creative Arts and Humanities.

Arts & Culture news from the Scottish Government

Follow this link.

Welcome to Whittaker Live - the RSAMD's long-established performing arts blog. We've just moved to blogger.com, to give the blog a fresh new image. You'll still find the same mix of performing arts news and reviews, useful websites, interesting books and recordings, and the occasional link to study skills or careers advice info. News of our alumni, too! We're happy to post links to our staff, students and alumni's websites so that their achievements are profiled for all the world to see.