Royal Ballet's Manon

[kbarber]

At some locations there will be a repeat screening on Monday, January 26 at 6:30 pm. That will make for quite a ballet weekend: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland on the 24th, the Bolshoi's Swan Lake on the 25th and Manon on the 26th.

http://www.landmarkcinemas.com/en.aspx

Of course one could miss the Bolshoi Swan Lake without being any the worse off... (sorry, my editor does not allow me access to the emoji)

[volcanohunter]

I don't disagree with you. I'm not planning on going to see the Bolshoi's Swan Lake except in the very unlikely instance that it fields a cast that can overcome the production's limitations. The frontrunners are not it.

As for the timing, I'm sure the chain would argue that the bunheads and their teachers have not been attending ballet cinemacasts anyway, and I fear they'd be right. Movie chains may be willing to spare some time for arts programming, but I guess they want the auditoriums clear in time to screen a Saturday afternoon blockbuster. They could further argue that Met in HD audiences routinely go to their multiplexes on Saturdays at 11 am in Alberta and 10 am in BC. Ontarians and Manitobans will have to adapt to watching by "Mountain" time, I suppose.

There is always the Monday evening repeat. 6:30 pm is not such a late start time, and the $11.99 children's ticket price still applies. Although I'm not sure the kiddies should be watching Manon in any case. Teachers assure me that the innuendo in La Fille mal gardée goes right over kids' heads.

[kbarber]

the classic mistake, thinking opera audiences and ballet audiences are the same.

And as for the ballet teachers and students not coming, well it's not as if the cinemas have actively promoted their ballet offerings to that market!

For Manon I was thinking more of the 14+ students.

[volcanohunter]

the classic mistake, thinking opera audiences and ballet audiences are the same.

There is overlap. There have even been attempts to understand the habits of cultural "highbrows" and "omnivores."

http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/2008-SPPA-Age.pdf

[Helene]

I think the mistake is to thinking that natural and new audiences for ballet and opera are the same. There are far more dancers-in-training, who should be a natural audience for ballet in film, especially given the price point, for whom Saturday morning is a conflict than teenage opera singers. There are many teenagers in choirs, but that doesn't directly translate into being opera fans or future opera singers, as the voice is too undeveloped at that point, while dance training is in full frenzy or heading that way.

[volcanohunter]

Eons ago, when I was a dance student, it never ceased to astonish me how disinterested many of my classmates were in attending performances. Remember Allegra Kent in Dancing for Mr. B, when she said that as a child she knew she loved ballet, but she wasn't sure she liked ballets? I came across students who felt that way surprisingly often. Sadly, I have seen very few dancers-in-training watching ballets at the movie theaters, even on Sunday afternoons, when there shouldn't be much in the way of time conflicts. You'd think that ballet students should be ballet's natural audience, but it doesn't necessarily seem to work that way.

[Helene]

Balanchine didn't think he liked ballet until he was in one, so that does make sense in a sad way.

[volcanohunter]

Well my experience today was not especially happy. It seems the movie theater received a faulty disc that would not play. I'd been to previous screenings of content from the same distributor that went off without a hitch, but it also wasn't my first experience with cancellations. Last season I arrived at a rival multiplex to discover that the screening of the Royal Ballet's Giselle had been called off because of faulty technology, and there also wasn't enough time to drive to the next nearest location without missing the first act of the ballet.

As for the audience, the crowd was small and overwhelmingly female, but somewhat larger than the group that had come to see the Royal Opera the week before, when the weather was horrendous. I recognized a lot of faces. Nearly everyone who'd been there last week had come back to see the ballet. As for dance students, there was certainly no one there younger than 20. It seemed to me that nearly everyone standing in line to look after their refunds opted to get tickets to the encore screening on January 26, so they're not easily put off.