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Great news! NYCB performance in Paris will be broadcast on PBS February 17 & 24 as part of the Great Performances series:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/arts/dance/city-ballets-stars-dance-on-television-wnet.html?_r=0

 

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Sara Mearns, Adrian Danchig-Waring and Lauren Lovette will be featured in “Walpurgisnacht Ballet,” which is set to music by Gounod; Megan Fairchild and Joaquin De Luz will dance “Sonatine,” a pas de deux set to Ravel; and Tiler Peck, Andrew Veyette, Teresa Reichlen, Tyler Angle, Alston Macgill, Anthony Huxley, Brittany Pollack and Taylor Stanley will be among the 50 dancers in Bizet’s “Symphony in C.”

 

“La Valse,” the ballet on that first color CBS telecast, will be back, too. This time the ballet, set to Ravel’s haunting score, will be a showcase for a new generation dancers: Sterling Hyltin, Jared Angle and Amar Ramasar.

 

Edited by California
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With the exception of a one very late night showing of the ABT documentary, my local PBS stations has, to my knowledge, never shown ballet programming.

 

Mine do, but very rarely, and sometimes ballet programs never show up at all(on the major PBS channel in my area, KQED - unless it's Nutcracker and sometimes not even then. Ballet programming does appear infrequently on the cable PBS channels.

 

Very few Nutcrackers broadcast this year to my knowledge, whether on PBS or elsewhere.

 

I advise those who are PBS subscribers to call/write to complain. Perhaps persistence will pay off.

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Strange things happen - right now I'm watching the PNB's Nutcracker on a non-PBS station in Southern California. Naturally there were no advance promotions of this broadcast.

 

Given the size of the adult North American ballet audience, and all the children enrolled in ballet schools, plus all manner of professionals working in the dance world, there are plenty of people to sign electronic petitions asking for more opportunities to watch dance programs on TV and the Internet. Whew, that was a long sentence.

Netflix and Amazon should get involved in creating ballet performance series too.

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13 hours ago, pherank said:

Strange things happen - right now I'm watching the PNB's Nutcracker on a non-PBS station in Southern California. Naturally there were no advance promotions of this broadcast.

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Netflix and Amazon should get involved in creating ballet performance series too.

 

Which, please?  The video of their previous version?  Stowell & Sendak & Co.?  Even without those particulars, it's an interesting datum about media treatment of high culture, but if it's their recent Balanchine production, it's even stranger.  And what about the station?  Not part of any network or chain belonging to one owner?

 

Series might generate more of the visibility sponsors want, I suppose, whether Amazon or Netflix or ...   (Is the example of the early A & E worth mentioning?  Some of the content - a lot of the content - was pretty awful, IIRC.  Amazing it went on so long.)  Strange, incomprehensible things go on.

 

Merry Christmas from Seattle, anyway!  (Or, bah, humbug?...  No, not about PNB's current "Nut", enjoyable and charming, that, but about the present unsatisfactory subject.) 

Edited by Jack Reed
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A few years ago I queried the director of Iowa Public Television as to why they did not schedule the Great Performances series episode of the School of American Ballet spring program (which was broadcast in early December of that year).  She replied that it was not in keeping with midwestern values and in lieu of the regularly-scheduled Great Performances they would show some locally-produced program from Minnesota Public Television.  I did not call her a moron, nitwit, nor plebian.  I did not tell her that a woman from Coralville Iowa is in the NYCB corps de ballet.  Nor did I tell her that our friends' daughter is a scholarship student in the SAB summer program.

I did tell her my New York friends would be laughing at her response.  

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Was there any indication of her background?  From her remark about "midwestern values" her thinking sounds literally provincial:  The School of American Ballet is far away and our local market won't relate to it, or something like that.  (Such provinciality does get some New Yorkers laughing, not that they're always so well informed about things "west of the Hudson" as I'd wish.)  This thinking is ignorant of the value of communications generally to take us away from our familiar and ordinary experience and ignorant of the mind-expanding potential of art in particular.

 

I don't mean her geographical background but the background of her thinking, where she's "coming from" in that sense.  

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5 hours ago, DanielBenton said:

I did not tell her that a woman from Coralville Iowa is in the NYCB corps de ballet.  Nor did I tell her that our friends' daughter is a scholarship student in the SAB summer program.

I did tell her my New York friends would be laughing at her response.  

 

Ballet schools are made up of children who, generally, do not come from lower Manhattan. ;)

In fact, the US ballet companies are made up of people from every corner of the US: Sara Mearns - South Carolina, David Hallberg - South Dakota, Isabella Boylston - Idaho, Misty Copeland - Missouri, Tiler Peck - Bakersfield CA, Carrie Imler, Joseph Walsh, Vanessa Zahorian, Ashley Bouder - Pennsylvania, Sterling Hyltin, Jared Matthews, Sara Webb - Texas, and on and on.

 

The fear for many conservative people is that these programs are propaganda coming from the 'elites'. But I see no problem with showing mainly local fair, such as broadcasting dance programs put on by the University of Oklahoma School of Dance for that area of the country. And inevitably, there will also be some broadcasts of the big companies (e.g. Mariinsky, POB, ABT), and old classic ballet performances, mixed in with the local fair. Over time, people will get used to it - all over again.

 

Netfilx should market a series similar to the 1950s Canadian Broadcasting Company broadcasts of NYCB.

 

Jack: it was the Maurice Sendak version that was being televised.

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What the choice of the earlier PNB version of Nut suggests to me was that somebody at the station thought it was time for something seasonal and that video - a commercial release by now, right? - would fill the bill.

 

Interesting that the PBS station sacked the director - or maybe not.  If there are enough complaints about on organization, I suppose it is the director who goes, under the presumption that changes will be instigated by the replacement.   

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