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What if you hit it big in the lottery?


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Along the lines of Alexandra's "please, please, Mr. Vilar" topic, I shall pose the question: what would you do (for the arts) if you hit the lottery jackpot? I'm assuming here that you win so big that there's an awful lot left over after you take care of yourself and your nearest and dearest.

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1. Hire the Bolshoi to do a Massine festival (and make sure that only old-style Bolshoi dancers need apply).

2. Make DanceView a color glossy monthly and give the writers a big raise smile.gif

3. Buy the copyrights to all the Tchaikovsky scores and license them -- very carefully -- only to companies who will NOT do pseudoFreudian or other New Now productions of "Swan Lake," "Nuts" and "Beauty."

4. Mount a Bournonville Festival with stagings by the half-dozen or so people who could stage the ballets properly (none of them presently, or recently, employed by the Royal Danish Ballet).

5. Make a huge donation to the Balanchine Ballets Rehearsal Fund at NYCB.

6. (Hardest of all) Scour the globe for dancers who can phrase Ashton as Ashton was meant to be phrased, then revive every one of his ballets that can be revived.

(I only buy tickets in Really Big Lotteries.)

7. Just to round out the last century, hire the Kirov-Mariinsky, Rebels Wing, to do a Fokine Festival, with strict instructions, and donate the last few millions to reviving all of Petipa that is notated. Next stop, Lavrovsky.....

Who says there isn't a ballet repertory?

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I have always wanted to be backstage during a performsnce to observe the real effort and work involved in a major staging.I enjoy watching Class, rehearsals and coaching as much as actual performances.

I would pay whatever it cost to be backstage and watch the Kirov dance Bayadere.

One can only dream!

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I would arrange plenty of opportunities for students (elemntary school as well as high school) to Go to see their local ballet so that people who would have no other exsposure to ballet would learn to enjoy it.

i would also fund outreach dance progams giving people a chance to learn ballet when they might have never conisdered to.

On the more frivoulus side i would set up a balanchine company in london so that i could see his ballet more than once every few years!!

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I'd set up some sort of fund for ailing ballet companies- some sort of high yield mutual fund, so that the interest would aid these companies in their time of need, then make sure they were all properly equipped with endowments and such. Then I would make it easy for people who want to stage ballets for their companies to contact the experts who can really do a good job.

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If I were to hit the lottery or discover I had been switched at birth with a Rockefeller....

First, buy an opera house. Actually buy some existing building, gut it and create performance, rehearsal, school and administrative space within it. The Edward Waffle Opera House would be the basis for everything to come.

The first person hired (after the architect and general contractor) would be the music director. She would have led from both pit and on the podium, would be respected by singers and soloists throughout the world and would have had significant orchestra building experience.

The music director would be in charge of opera programming as well as the occasional symphony type series. She would be responsible for creating an orchestra that can play on stage as well as in the pit. Since even lottery winnings are limited, the band would not be as large as the typical symphony orchestra—the permanent roster of players would be large enough for Mozart, with free-lancers being hired as necessary when we programmed, for example, Strauss. Her principal assistant would be responsible for the opera chorus and have some conducting opportunities.

The general director of the ballet company would be the next person hired. He will be a choreographer with a distinct style (one that I like) who will have artistic control of all matters involving dance. He will hire the dancers in the initial company and be responsible for employing ballet masters to insure continuing quality. Not sure if we will have a school or affiliate with a few in the area.

The autumn opera season will run from the last week of September until the week before Thanksgiving. It will be run on the stagione system, with each work being presented for two or three weeks. The music director will program the season, with veto power from her boss (me). Scheduling Wozzek, Lulu, Mathis der Maler and From the House of the Dead would be an adventurous and welcome change from typical programming. Producing them one after the other for the fall season would not be a good idea.

The day after Thanksgiving, of course, The Nutcracker takes over the stage—and the ballet company would continue to occupy the house through mid-February. January and February programming would be up to the ballet director. At least on three act story ballet would be done, and Valentine’s day (or the weekend closest to it) would be a non-subscription evening of excruciatingly romantic (or Romantic) dance.

The opera would be back in business from mid-February until mid-April. On April 15 there will be a production of I Masnadieri (the Robbers) or Il Pirata. Every March 29, on the anniversary of its original production, Fidelio will be given. The ballet season would resume in mid-April and run until the end of May. Swan Lake would be given every year, either in the winter or spring ballet season.

Summer would be given over to festival type productions—French Grand Opera as originally presented in Paris, for example—the type of things that only a festival, with long rehearsal time can offer and independent fund raising, can offer.

Both the opera and ballet seasons will be scheduled so that chamber music, modern dance and vocal series can be given. There will be at least three concerts with the pit orchestra on stage in works the music director will chose (Beethoven symphonies, Mozart piano concertos, etc.) and at least two concerts featuring the opera chorus, led by the chorus master.

The opera house will have one rehearsal space for opera and one for ballet. Each will have an area the same dimensions of the stage. There will be areas for classrooms, administrative offices and other necessary but secondary functions.

There will be a smaller theater for lectures, student productions and community activities. It will be available several times per year free of charge to members of the company or employees of the house who wish to produce concerts.

Charlotte Church, the Three Tenors or the Lord of the Dance will never play there, nor will any group with the words "Irish" and "Dance" in its name. If this last restriction means we will miss some otherwise wonderful production, so be it.

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Originally posted by cargill:

[QB]This is probably illegal, but if I had oodles of money, I would hire people to make sure that anyone who messed around with Swan Lake would be very, very sorry....

Gee, do you include people who have already messed it up, or just future messing arounders? How clever of you to think of this. Maybe I will use my lottery winnings to pay people NOT to do certain ballets. I will buy the rights and mothball them. Some of the ballets I will be protecting, and some I will be eliminating....

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I feel I must pop in here. I'm sorry if you were offended, but I think that is a misreading of what Ed wrote, and a misreading of Ed, who is a long time member of this board and would not knowingly offend a fruit fly (no offense, of course, to fruit flies). He doesn't like "Lord of the Dance"-type shows and he won't have them in his imaginary theater. That's his right. This isn't an attack on the Irish nation. If someone said they didn't want Russian ballet in their theater would that raise a furor? Or if someone had just seen a night of a Bournonville ballet and hated it, would saying "I'll never go to see anything with 'Danish' in the title again?" be seen as offensive?

We cannot have a discussion group if everyone is constantly worrying if something they say or any time they mention a particular country or group, or age or gender, may possibly offend someone, and while we strive very hard to have a pleasant, civil board, and everyone who posts should keep in mind that there are people from many nations, ages, races and genders who read the board, I do not want to enforce extreme political correctness.

I would suggest in the future that if a remark you read here is "offensive" that you PM the person and keep your objections private. If anyone has a problem with this policy, or would like to make further comments, please feel free to email me: at@balletalert.com

Please return this thread to the topic smile.gif

[ February 20, 2002: Message edited by: alexandra ]

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First, I would hire a complete company of dancers and repetiteurs to be schooled in the correct manner of dancing the works that comprise the repertoire of the Diaghilev Era (Fokine, Massine, Nijinsky, Nijinska, early-Balanchine, etc. ballets). I would then hold a Diaghilev Festival once a year in Washington, DC (of course), in which each and every Diaghilev-era ballet would be performed in proper steps, complete music & the authentic Bakst/Benois, etc. designs! The ballets would be performed in chrornological order, similar to the way that the 1993 Balanchine Celebration at NYCB was run, when every Balanchine opus in the NYCB rep was performed in more-or-less chron order. So my 'New Diaghilev Ballet' would debut with 'Pavillon d'Armide' (which exists in the Nikita Dolgushin reconstruction, by the way...Dolgushin would be my artistic director, incidentally. Andris Liepa chief repetiteur. Male lead - today's Nijinsky: Nikolai Tsiskaridze. Prima ballerina assoluta? You can guess that one! smile.gif )!

[ February 20, 2002: Message edited by: Jeannie ]

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If Id win big in a lottery, I think (after bying me a maserati, a Jaguar and maybe a ferrari) most of my moneys were needed to fullfill Alexandras project! And maybe some dollars to the starving kids in africa... but not so big amounts that it would affect the finishing of "Project Alexandra - world domination" smile.gif

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About making people who mess with Swan Lake regret it, I was actually thinking about starting with Gorky, and eliminating all elements of the jester, and realism and Freud. There are so many bad Swan Lakes around (I can't think of a good one left), that it would probably take all my money!

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