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GIRL EMPOWERMENT

WINTER 15 / ISSUE 3


01. Cooking And Girl Empowerment Karen Moderchai

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TABLE OF CONTENTS


opinion

people

place

05. Lead Like A Girl Zeynep Ilgaz

09. Sara Mearns, In Her Prime At City Ballet, Inspires Debate and Awe Alastair Macaulay

19. Vienna Molly Yeh

07. Young Girls Explain Why Beauty Standards Are So Impossible Taylor Pittman

15. You Can Be You Sophie Cassiano 17. Where The Souls Rest Simon Varsano

21. Local Milk Retreats: Vienna, Italy Part I Elizabeth Evelyn 25. Travel Photography: Porto Lina Skukauskè


Empowering a little girl has been one of my great challenges as a mother. Teaching her to find her voice- her will, her loves and her kindness within herself. We talk about beauty that starts from the heart, and I try to teach by example. Sophia knows my job well, I cook, I photograph, I gather - I create. There’s always a new project or endeavor, and Sophia is right there - learning by watching and also celebrating my accomplishments with hugs and high fives. Our studio is across the street from our home, and so Sophia spends many days here, drawing and hanging out - and cooking with us in the kitchen. Cooking has always been a central focus in our lives and connectivity. It is my job, yes, but it is so much more than that. It brings us together, it teaches Sophia love and nourishment, community and family. I try to teach her other lessons in the kitchen, like you can do no wrong. Take the risk - do it on your own. She can dice and wash produce and roll out dough and it’s really no big deal if she makes a mistake. This to me is an important point in finding your voice, both in the kitchen and in life.

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COVER

COOKING AND GIRL EMPOWERMENT KAREN MODERCHAI COPY AND PHOTOGRAPHY


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LEAD LIKE A GIRL: ZEYNEP ILGAZ PHOTOGRAPHER: LEILA MENDEZ

A popular ad from Always tried to answer that question by asking subjects to demonstrate running, fighting, and throwing “like a girl.” Older subjects put on a weak performance, but when young girls were given the same instructions, they ran, threw, and fought as hard as they could. The ad asked, “When did doing something ‘like a girl’ become an insult?” While close to 52 percent of professional jobs are held by women, we’re substantially underrepresented in leadership roles. Only 14.6 percent of executive officers, 8.1 percent of top

earners, and 4.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. At this rate, it’s estimated that women won’t achieve leadership parity until 2085. However, not all barriers facing women can be attributed to the glass ceiling imposed by the traditional workplace. Women often hold themselves back from advancement with self-imposed barriers. After all, adult women in the ad performed “like a girl” with just as much mockery as men.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO DO SOMETHING “LIKE A GIRL”?

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OPINION


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WHAT HOLDS WOMEN BACK? In a conversation about the likelihood of the U.S. electing a female president, Hillary Clinton said, “There’s still this built-in questioning about women’s executive ability, whether it’s in the corporate boardroom or in the political sphere.”

wrong. This view led to a lack of transparency, inefficient processes, and a damaged bottom line. I realized that mistakes are an opportunity to learn and improve.

Much of this questioning stems from women themselves. Women are held back in the workplace by:

When women adopt leadership roles, they contribute a unique set of skills, ideas, and life experiences that can broaden the entire company’s insight, strategies, and bottom line.

A fear of failure. While men know their personal worth isn’t determined by professional failures, young women often fear that workplace missteps will cost them their job, reputation, and success.

On average, Fortune 500 companies with more female board representation achieved a significantly higher financial performance than those with fewer female representatives.

Family matters. Some women fear that employers will view them as vulnerable, inefficient, or unmotivated if they decide to start a family.

So how can businesses — especially those led by women — recruit and nurture talented female leaders? The best way is by creating a supportive environment that actively empowers women to lead by:

An inferiority complex. Some women still believe that men are stronger leaders, have better ideas, and are more equipped to achieve success. Women can only break through these barriers by helping themselves. Here are three things every woman can do to propel herself forward, whether she’s an intern or CEO: Be yourself. When I started my company, I thought that if I acted tough, I’d achieve more success. I wore pants to work and rarely dared to talk about my family. But one day, I decided to stop pretending. I started talking about my family with customers, and to my surprise, people began relating to me, our relationships grew stronger, and the company culture became unbelievably transparent. Trust your instincts. Women are wired with great intuition. It was a big risk for my husband and I to uproot our lives to move to America, but we trusted our ability to succeed in a new place, and we’ve never looked back. Embrace mistakes. In my company’s early years, I was afraid to talk about my mistakes. I thought my team would think I was weak — but I was

Encouraging mentorship and collaboration. Women increase their chances of succeeding in business when they have mentors to provide reallife examples. Letting family come first. Having a family should never deter anyone — man or woman — from pursuing a career. Create an atmosphere that nurtures family life with benefits like flexible work schedules, on-site childcare, and education. Taking the pressure off. Women should feel comfortable vocalizing their ideas — not just agreeing with their male counterparts to protect themselves politically. Encourage everyone to speak up. Women are great at building relationships, empowering others, tuning into people’s needs, and balancing a staggering number of responsibilities — skills that are great assets, not liabilities, in the workplace. Even if you fail, you’ll fail like a girl. And there’s nothing wrong with that.


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OPINION

YOUNG GIRLS EXPLAIN WHY BEAUTY STANDARDS ARE SO IMPOSSIBLE TAYLOR PITTMAN PHOTOGRAPHER: NERINGA REKASIUTE

In case you needed further confirmation that unrealistic beauty standards affect girls at an early age, SheKnows Media is here to help. In a new video from the digital media company’s Hatch program, young girls discuss body image and how it’s influenced by the media. According to one of the participants, altered images on magazine covers and in advertisements fuel unhealthy comparisons. “You can pick out all your flaws, and then society does that as well for you,” she said. As the young girls reflect on weighing themselves at birthday parties and sucking in their stomachs when they wore bikinis at camp, they prove that body image issues start at a young age. According to Common Sense Media’s report, children as young as 5 years old “express dissatisfaction with their bodies.” The video also features a second group of girls and their opinions on the effects of unrealistic beauty standards. They’re clearly younger, but they still understand what it means to have a negative body image. “It’s, like, really sad that they think whatever they look like, it’s not good enough for them,” one said. At the end, all the girls come together to draw self-portraits pointing out what they love about their bodies. By doing this, the Hatch program hopes to teach kids to not only accept their differences, but appreciate them. This message is summed up best by one of the youngest participants, and all she needed was a few simple words. “You shouldn’t be doubting yourself.”


SARA MEARNS, IN HER PRIME AT CITY BALLET, INSPIRES DEBATE AND AWE ALASTAIR MACAULAY PHOTOGRAPHER: ERIN KESTENBAUM AND SARAH SILVER

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PEOPLE

The ballerina Sara Mearns, now 29, has entered her prime. She has surely become the most Dionysiac artist in an Apollonian genre, very probably the most talked-of ballerina in America and quite possibly the most argued-about ballerina anywhere. The arguments don’t diminish her; they’re good for the art. People argue about Ms. Mearns’s body type, her stage personality and her interpretations. Is she too forceful, too sultry, too broad, too personal, too hot, too immodest? You can hear people debating the answers around New York. It’s likely that her own views about these things change: Her figure has altered from season to season, and her way with several roles has evolved considerably. Four factors don’t change: her musicality, her incisiveness, her glamour and her intensity, all of which are exceptional. Above all, Ms. Mearns, who joined City Ballet as an apprentice in 2003 and became a principal in 2008, is the dancer most associated with the current resurgence of New York City Ballet in central repertory by its founding ballet master, George Balanchine (1904-1983). This season, she made shining debuts in two of his most elusive ballerina roles, “Chaconne” and “Mozartiana.” Away from Balanchine, she’s also today’s most strikingly individual interpreter of the double role of Odette-Odile in “Swan Lake” anywhere. And among the many roles she’s created are recent ones of note for the choreographers Alexei Ratmansky and Justin Peck, in ballets that return to repertory in the 2015-16 season (Mr. Ratmansky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” from 2014, and Mr. Peck’s “Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes,” 2015).


She’s a Romantically dramatic virtuoso. The Dionysiac, inflamed side of her is fabulously evident in the exotic colors and flamboyant bravura she brings to Balanchine ballets like “Cortège Hongrois” (1973) and, above all, “Walpurgisnacht Ballet” (1980). When balletgoers ask the nostalgic question “Who today dances as if her life depends on it?,” my mind flies like an arrow to Ms. Mearns. In “Walpurgisnacht,” Ms. Mearns gives the single greatest ballerina performance of our era — hurling out fantastically bold, amazingly precise, rivetingly complex dance coloratura with musical blaze and rich colors. I say “hurling out” — this is exultant, space-filling dancing, with a strong element of swagger — but I don’t underestimate the twinkling wit of Ms. Mearns’s delivery, the driving impulsiveness of her self-contradictory turns to right and left, the subtleties of her unexpected pauses. In her theatrically sensational virtuosity, as seen in “Walpurgisnacht,” she, more than any other 21st-century ballerina, is like Maria Callas. But Callas was in many ways a mold-breaking singer of unprecedented style and diversity, whereas Ms. Mearns is following the paths trailed by many Balanchine ballerinas. Part of the debate surrounding her is that she is less sleek, less aloof, less unknowable than several of the sublime dancers who were shaped by Balanchine. “A thin style is our style,” he said in 1957. The texture of Ms. Mearns’s style is rich, even compared to that of the grander, yet more audacious and more unpredictable Suzanne Farrell, for whom “Walpurgisnacht” was created. One phrase you often hear around the Balanchine experience, “See the music,” is usually nonsense: Nobody who truly listens to those scores can think that this choreography is their visualization — instead, it’s the animus to the music’s anima. What’s more, Balanchine’s choreography employs many different musicalities. Ms. Mearns, however,

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DANCE IS NOT A JOB. I WOULD NEVER SAY I'M GOING TO WORK. I WOULD SAY I'M GOING TO THE THEATER. perfectly illumines the “See the music” motto in one vital if seldom discussed way. Balanchine trained his dancers, not invariably but as a rule, to arrive in a position a fraction ahead of the beat. You saw the dancer, and then in a trice you heard the music; but seven years ago this aspect of Balanchine dancing had virtually slipped away. Nobody has restored it more brilliantly than Ms. Mearns; the music arrives in place like the answer to her thought. Musicality in ballet includes the seeming ability to play with time: Ms. Mearns shows many aspects of rhythm and phrasing, and the secrets of both lingering and anticipation. Only Tiler Peck — another City Ballet principal — demonstrates such complex musicianship today; when you observe them in the same role (Balanchine’s “Allegro Brillante,“ above all), you have one of the most fascinating compare-and-contrast exercises in dancer-watching. Ms. Peck, an effortless paragon, has time in her pocket; Ms. Mearns is a Titaness whom the elements serve. Their differences, again, are good for the company and for the whole art. Ms. Mearns — an exuberant blond bombshell — often seems like a movie star from a bygone era. In the absurd head shot recently added to her City Ballet biography, she’s trying to be both Veronica Lake and Marilyn Monroe, gazing at the camera with parted lips and hair lavishly cascading to one side. In most roles, she wears more eye makeup than any other dancer onstage. This works for her: Her eyes aren’t large, but she uses them well — her audience is seldom left in any doubt where her gaze is directed, and that gaze often seems to smolder or even

burn. That strong use of maquillage is part of the striking element of Romantic selfdramatizing in her stage personality. She has unconventionally high shoulders, athletic legs and feet. (The shoulders of a copybook ballerina slope down, with an impression of marmoreal repose; the legs of the same copybook artist show no sign of muscular emphasis.) You can see why Mr. Peck cast her in “Rodeo,” in which she’s the only woman, holding her own amid all the guys. Two ballets by Mr. Ratmansky, “Namouna, a Grand Divertissement” (2012) and “Pictures” showed her startling impetus (and equally startling ability to stop on a dime) in different lights. In “Namouna,” she’s a laughingly imperious odalisque, cavorting voluptuously onto the floor and off it again in regal self-intoxication. In “Pictures,” her hurtling force has the wild naïveté of a child discovering a new world. Check out the transformative power with which she takes a solo entrance in the third movement of Balanchine’s “Concerto Barocco.” Powerfully, exhilaratingly, she jumps down a diagonal and then recrosses the stage in a series of glorious off-balance steps. Her timing and her energy are sensational. Yet this “Barocco” passage is another of the controversial aspects of her dancing. Is this kind of vaulting attack and bold assertiveness appropriate to Bach? Is it appropriate to a ballet whose manner has traditionally been — however jazzy or incisive — impersonal and cool? I love it; but Balanchine might well have asked for more selflessness and more mystery.


YES, WE ARE ATHLETES. BUT IT'S NOT A COMPETITION. IT'S ART.


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Yet

this glowing powerhouse can be rivetingly muted, subtly eloquent, possessed of marvelous stillness. Several of us first fell under her spell early in 2009, when she danced the quietly rapturous “Vienna Woods” section of Balanchine’s “Vienna Waltzes.” Just the way she and her partner, Tyler Angle, both standing still, looked at each other across the stage was ravishing. Another role in which she’s quietly superb is in Balanchine’s “Robert Schumann’s ‘Davidsbündlertänze,’ ” where she plays Clara Schumann the wife; many of her most heart-stopping moments here are just pauses, turns of the head, small gestures. Many of the best dancers are made up of opposites; certainly she is. Those high shoulders used to seem stiff, even to shorten the line of her neck. They seldom seem so now, but at all times they’ve been opposed by the yielding pliancy of her back. Without good control of the back, a dancer can’t have an arabesque — the line in which she or he extends a leg straight behind. Without an arabesque, a ballerina is a lighthouse without a light — but City Ballet has had (still has) a number of principal dancers with no arabesque to speak of. Ms. Mearns, however, has an

arabesque charged with ardor, gesture, urgency. She extends her line; and energy courses through her arm and leg — through her whole being — into space. She’s not alone at City Ballet. The shyly radiant Maria Kowroski (a phenomenally long-limbed dancer whose leg in arabesque aims like a missile) and the impish, scathingly fast, bitingly exact Ashley Bouder were principals before her; their best performances in the 2014-15 season showed them taking their art to new peaks. The wonderfully spontaneous, driven Sterling Hyltin; the sparkling, urgent Ms. Peck; and the grandly inscrutable Teresa Reichlen emerged in the same few years as Ms. Mearns. There have been seasons where their artistry seemed yet more remarkable than hers. Instinctively theatrical, Ms. Mearns has conquered some roles only when she has found her way of dramatizing them. She danced the sublime second movement in Balanchine’s “Symphony in C” for years without seeming to possess it; when she did, she made it more tragic than it has ever been, as if moving unstoppably toward death. Though the Sugar Plum Fairy in “Nutcracker” can be given many

accentuations, it usually needs a pearly delicacy and white light that don’t as yet belong to Ms. Mearns. When she finally made the role her own in the 2013-14 Christmas season, partnered by Zachary Catazaro, she did so by giving the role amazingly adult weight, as if she was darkly possessed of all the world’s mysteries. Such a dancer makes us comb forthcoming repertory in hope of her next appearances. City Ballet dances a twoweek season at Saratoga, N.Y., in July. When I learned that Ms. Mearns’s eight roles there will include “Pictures,” “Rodeo,” “Symphony in C,” and — a role she has seldom danced in New York — Sanguinic in Balanchine’s “The Four Temperaments,” I wished I was not booked on vacation elsewhere. Repertory for the company’s New York 2015-16 season includes “Mozartiana,” “Pictures,” “Rodeo,” “Swan Lake,” and “Walpurgisnacht”; the titles alone whet my appetite.


LOCAL MILK RETREATS: VENICE, ITALY PART I ELIZABETH EVELYN COPY AND PHOTOGRAPHY

I’m so happy to let you all know that the images of the Venice retreat you see here, some of my favorites I’ve ever taken, are going to have an encore–Skye (of From My Dining Table) and I are hosting another retreat at the palazzo this coming January and tickets just went on sale yesterday evening—we only have four spots left at the moment so if you’re interested, you can find all the details & reserve a spot here! EDIT: We are now sold out but you can join our mailing list here to keep abreast of future retreats like the ones in Spain, Paris, and Japan & all other future events! These shots of our retreat last year that we did with Ginny Branch Stelling, Aaron Teece, and Lisa Garcia are a good preview of what’s to come this year… Venice was the first European city I ever set foot in when I was 15 years old. Over the years I’ve written many stories in these streets—memories layered upon memories, but the ones pictured here are by far my favorite. I’m so happy that Chef Teece (the one looking sugar smeared, bearded, and moody with meringues) will be joining Skye & I again this year as we embark on another journey through the canal veined Venetian streets. I’ve cried 15 year old tears on stone steps in this city. Listened to show tunes about the French revolution in a trundle bed here. Thought I was in love for more than a few street lit hours with more than a few different faces. I don’t know why I keep ending up in Venice, but I do. And it’s a source of endless inspiration. There’s a whole other city far from the throngs of tourists that still exists, and that is the Venice I love. I really want these photos to speak for themselves, but here’s a brief overview of what we did last year. Skye graciously offered to host a retreat in Venice, her second home since she was just a child, and of course I didn’t even have to think twice about taking her up on it. We’ve been friends since the first retreat I ever did in Portugal, and her work continues to inspire me. We were joined by Ginny Branch Stelling—a hilarious woman & one of the best stylists around. She taught alongside me, brought a treasure trove of props, and made sure we had beautiful tables at every meal. Lisa Garcia, a dear friend & brilliant artist (who’s work Sonadora Handmade many of you are probably familiar with), came along and kept things behind the scenes moving, and Chef Aaron Teece made sure we had gorgeous food on the table—his frito misto was the stuff of legend. As was his Osso Buco. There were high teas. Grand suppers. Nights out on the town. And lots of exploration of the process of visual story telling both from the photography perspective and the styling perspective. Our team was a family. Our guests were the same. There are no words for what these experiences are. Retreat has always been the best word I could come up with. Workshop doesn’t do the experiences we try to create justice. They are about so much more than learning technical skills. They are about recharging, relationships, and creative inspiration. And if you can’t make it to Venice with us this year, there will also be retreats in Japan, Paris, and Spain in the spring!

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PLACE


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-COCO CHANEL

WHO AND WHAT SHE WANTS.

A Girl Should Be two things:


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