Kathleen O'Connell

So, of course I had to google them. I watched their little video, which promises "Strength, Discipline, Agility, Friendship" — that and a wall of mirrors would seem to accommodate both a dojo and a ballet studio. Alas, there's no ballet in evidence on their website.

On a slightly different tack: data on which US businesses and non-profits received Payroll Protection Program (PPP) Loans is now publicly available and ready for review and analysis. (This is why there's been a sudden flurry of "PPP Shaming" in the press and on social media. Whether it was appropriate for certain kinds of businesses and non-profits to receive PPP funds and whether they should be shamed for it is certainly worth of debate, but I'm not going to go into that here.) Propublica has put together a very nice tool to search for loans over $150,000. You can search by organization name, lender, zip code and business type. If you want to see which ballet companies received loans over $150K, you can start by typing "ballet" into the search field. If the company's name contains "ballet" and if it received a loan over $150,000, its name should show up on the list. By way of example, here's the result for PNB: PACIFIC NORTHWEST BALLET ASSOCIATION Loan Amount $2-5 million Location Seattle, WA Industry Dance Companies Business Type Non-Profit Organization Jobs Retained 264 Lender U.S. Bank, National Association Date Approved April 13, 2020 Looking for loans UNDER $150,000 is a more challenging task. You can download a CSV file for recipients of loans under $150K by state from the Small Business Administration, but the files are huge. Depending on the computing resources available to you, it might take a long time to download, open, and parse the file for the states you're interested in. Have fun!

Alas, some (many?) of the most vulnerable—members of Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities as well as members of the precariat generally—won't be able to remain in quarantine. They will have to work outside the home, irregardless of the risk to their own health and the health of their families and loved ones. Someone has to work in the cafeterias that feed all those college students, and it's likely to be an older service worker making minimum wage with a cluster of risk factors setting them up for infection. If the arc of history were truly bending towards justice, these very essential workers—people who drive the economic engine just as much as a hedge fund manager or a silicon valley billionaire or a sportsball player—would be be at the front of the vaccine line along with medical personnel.

New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs budget for the coming fiscal year has been reduced by just under 11% to $189 million. (It was $212 million last year.) Frankly, I'm surprised the cuts weren't more drastic given the city's current and anticipated revenue shortfall and the need to re-direct funding to help those communities that have been hardest hit by covid-19.

It was a pleasure to revisit the company more or less as it was when I first started attending NYCB performances regularly w-a-a-a-y back in my salad days. I was particularly glad to see the Heather Watts I like to remember.

Oh how sad! I agree with Jay Rogoff's comment above that BR made great strides under Hoshino's stewardship. I keep hoping that some academic institution will see fit to fold BR in under its wing. (Hello, hello Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, are you listening? Might you at least digitize the archive? It would be a splendid way to honor his memory ...) PS - I did NOT know about the connection to the great Helen Levitt!

I just stumbled across NYTB/Chamberworks' "The Living Room Series." (NYTB/Chamberworks is the new name for the little company formerly known as New York Theater Ballet. I don't know when they changed their name; it may have been when they decamped to St. Marks.) Here's Marina Harss' notice about the series in The New Yorker: The company formerly known as New York Theatre Ballet is one of the few places you can see the work of the twentieth-century British choreographer Antony Tudor these days. Rigorous and taut, these ballets are all the more intense for the contained manner in which they are performed. The company has put several of them online, including “Dark Elegies” and “Jardin aux Lilas,” both from the nineteen-thirties. “Dark Elegies” is an exposition of communal grief—a timely theme—set to Mahler’s song cycle “Kindertotenlieder.” In “Jardin aux Lilas,” four people are caught in a quadrangle of impossible love during a rather gloomy afternoon garden party. The dancers of this New York-based chamber company perform the works—which can be viewed on Vimeo—with bracing sincerity. On offer are programs featuring Tudor, Ashton, Limon, as well as contemporary choreographers such as Gemma Bond and Pam Tanowitz. To note: A number of the videos were filmed in Florence Gould Hall, which has a postage-stamp sized stage. The music is usually live, but it also often takes the form of the piano reduction of the full score. Still, it's repertory that's not easy to find elsewhere. PS: You can see them perform Merce Cunningham's Scramble here: https://www.mercecunningham.org/activities/calendar/

He was always a genuinely princely presence onstage, and I'll miss seeing him there. I'm glad he'll still be contributing to the NYCB podcast and to the company in other ways as well. I wish him every success wherever his journey takes him!

Me too! I'd always hoped to see her career blossom at NYCB, and I'm glad she found an opportunity to shine at PNB.

The Merce Cunningham Trust has scheduled streams of 17 full-length performances of some of Cunningham's most notable works as part of the Cunningham Centennial Celebration. A new work is posted every few days and each will remain available for viewing for about one month. Notably, these are not archival films of Cunningham's own company, but rather videos taken during recent performances by companies such as The Stephen Petronio Company, Lyon Opera Ballet, and CNDC-Angers/Robert Swinston. The Petronio Company's performance of Tread goes offline on June 14, 2020, so if you have any interest in watching it, do so soon. The Merce Cunningham Trust's Vimeo channel has tons more content, including complete videos of the the Los Angeles, New York, and London performances of Night of 100 Solos; former Cunningham dancers teaching selected phrases from the works that will be shown as part of the streaming festival, interviews, and more. If you are interested in exploring Cunningham's work in more depth, or if you're just Merce curious, it's an interesting site to dip into and a little easier to navigate than the Trust's online dance capsules. The Trust's website is very comprehensive in terms of both the variety and scope of the material it makes available. If you want to learn more about the Cunningham technique itself, this video of Merce explaining an introductory class is a good place to start. Here's the schedule: Scramble / NYTB/ChamberWorks Film Online May.15.20 - Jun.13.20 Tread / Stephen Petronio Company Film Online May.18.20 - Jun.14.20 Totem Ancestor / John Scott Dance Film Online May.25.20 - Jun.21.20 Exchange / Lyon Opera Ballet Film Online Jun.1.20 - Jun.28.20. How to Pass, Kick, Fall and Run / American Dance Festival Film Online Jun.8.20 - Jul.5.20 BIPED / CNDC-Angers/Robert Swinston Film Online Jun.15.20 - Jul.12.20 Summerspace / Lyon Opera Ballet Film Online Jun.15.20 - Jul.12.20 See MoreScramble / NYTB/ChamberWorks Film Online Jun.22.20 - Jul.19.20 See MoreTotem Ancestor / John Scott Dance Film Online Jun.22.20 - Jul.19.20 Sounddance / The Juilliard School Film Online Jun.29.20 - Jul.26.20 RainForest / CCN-Ballet de Lorraine Film Online Jul.6.20 - Aug.2.20 Night Wandering / John Scott Dance Film Online Jul.13.20 - Aug.9.20 Beach Birds / CNDC-Angers/Robert Swinston Film Online Jul.13.20 - Aug.9.20. Summerspace / Lyon Opera Ballet Film Online Jul.20.20 - Aug.16.20 See MorePond Way / Royal Ballet Flanders Film Online Jul.27.20 - Aug.23.20 See MoreNight Wandering / John Scott Dance Film Online Aug.3.20 - Aug.30.20 RainForest / CCN-Ballet de Lorraine Film Online Aug.3.20 - Aug.21.20

AARGH! I really wanted to catch that Lulu stream! I tried a couple of times to no avail and gave up too soon, I guess ... ETA: Aha! for now, Lulu is still up and streamable. I don't know how long that will last, but for now it's still available.

The nightly Metropolitan Opera streams resumed on Wednesday, 6/3/20 as planned. (The video of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice is still up.) For reasons that elude me, Lincoln Center has not yet updated the Lincoln Center at Home page regarding the advertised but unavailable Dance Week videos. They did manage to tweet out a reply to someone who asked what was up: I'm no HTML genius, but even I could manage to insert an update on the mother ship's web page. Even if the date for the rescheduled stream hasn't been determined yet, the powers that be should be able to put some sort of alert on the relevant pages.

Woo Hoo! This is wonderful news—and not just about Creole Giselle. I'm delighted to see that Robert Garland's work will be featured as well.

All I could think of was the East Village's famous The Baroness, where everyone goes for their latex looks. (And everyone includes Beyoncé and Lady Gaga.) That chalkboard "You Need LATEX" sign is always out in front, rain or shine, to lure you in if the window displays don't.

Also Jiří Bubeníček's Carmen for Rome Opera Ballet, featuring Amar Ramasar. NYCB has a Bubeníček ballet in its repertory: Toccata, choreographed in 2009. I appear to have liked it just fine when I saw it. I haven't done more than scrubbed through the video to get a sense of what Bubeníček was up to. This review suggests that Ramasar and Susanna Salvi were worth watching, at least: "Susanna Salvi as Carmen was dancing with former New York City Ballet principal dancer Amar Ramasar. She didn’t allow him to steal the show, which is to her credit, as Ramasar is impressively charismatic, a fine actor, and moves beautifully contrasting his noble line with more modern contortions, most notably during his Flower Song solo which Bubeníček has constructed with loving care. He has a twinkle in his eye, style in his body and warmth in his heart. Salvi has a lot of spark and was fiery without being hand-on-the-hips ordinary as often happens on the opera stage. She has a personality that hits you between the eyes and was never obviously trying to be sexy unless she was deliberately teasing. It was clear why Don José was smitten by her and the chemistry between Salvi and Ramasar was winning."

I assume the Metropolitan Opera uses a more elaborate camera set up for its HD broadcasts and that it's beyond the financial reach of ABT to do the same. Agreed. It's dreadful for dance. Too big with bad sight lines and a stage that magnifies pin-drops, much less pointe shoes.

OMG. The best.

Late for Fred Day, but here's a video I can't watch too often. The dance is great, of course, but what a feat of editing! "Smoother than a fresh jar of Skippy" as the lyrics would have it.

It's not exactly performance streaming, but the NYPL's Jerome Robbins Dance Division is making some dance-related materials available online that you can access even if you don't have an NYPL library card: 1) Dance Oral Histories: "Would you like dance stories while social distancing? Tune in at: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2020/04/21/dance-oral-history, for excerpts from recent Dance Oral History Project interviews with Sandra Rivera, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Dyane Harvey-Salaam, Janet Adler, Pat Catterson, Heather Cornell, and more!" 2) Dance Division Coloring Books: "The staff of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division are excited to bring to you our first volume of colorable images from the Dance Division in The New York Public Library’s Digital Collections! We’ve selected 10 images of dancers moving together that we hope you’ll enjoy coloring, whether on your digital device or printed out on paper. We know many of you have found coloring to be a creative and relaxing activity at this time, and what better inspiration than images of dance?" Jerome Robbins Dance Division Coloring Book: Volume 1 "We hope you enjoyed volume 1 of our coloring books, featuring items from the Jerome Robbins Dance Division's collections in The New York Public Library’s Digital Collections! For volume 2, we turned to collaborations between visual artists and dancers to find images to share with you. These are 10 of the more than 3,000 original works of art in the Dance Division's physical collections, and include the work of four visual artists: Boris Anisfeld, Léon Bakst, Natalia Goncharova, and Rouben Ter-Arutunian. We hope just as dance inspired these and other artists to produce beautiful art, so too will your lives be brightened as you create your own versions of these masterpieces. As always, we invite you to post your finished image on our Facebook and Twitter feeds (#danceincolor), or you can email your masterpiece to dance@nypl.org." Jerome Robbins Dance Division Coloring Books: Volume 2 3) Online Jigsaw Puzzles posted at jigsawplanet.com. https://www.jigsawplanet.com/JeromeRobbinsDanceDivision 4) The Jerome Robbins Dance Division continues to make many of the digitized items in its collection freely available online via both its own web portal (https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/divisions/jerome-robbins-dance-division) and The Digital Public Library of America: (https://dp.la/search?partner="The New York Public Library"&provider="Jerome Robbins Dance Division. The New York Public Library"&page=1) Note that not all of the NYPL Dance Division items are available online: many of the performance videos can only be viewed on the Library's premises even though there's a thumbnail of the video displayed on the digital assets page. ETA: I forgot to include a link to the NYPL Jerome Robbins Dance Division home page. Here it is: https://www.nypl.org/locations/divisions/jerome-robbins-dance-division

Just delightful!

I don't want to be a pain since the good folks at PNB likely have their hands full with all kinds of stay-at-home challenges and my donation wasn't huge, but maybe I'll give it a shot. I really did want to check out this particular Giselle. (And would cheefully pony up some bucks to own a copy of the video, if one were available for purchase ... )

Sigh. I made a donation, but never got the invite. $$$ for a good cause, nonetheless.

From Stanley Glover of BalletX: Black men in Concert Dance - The Don't Rush Challenge

There's an occasional sighting of toilet paper in groceries and pharmacies in my neighborhood (downtown Manhattan), but we haven't seen a drop of proper hand sanitizer in months. Even liquid hand soap is hard to come by. However, you can buy face masks and bleach on the street corners now from the same guys that sell umbrellas when it starts to rain, so that's progress! (I would love to know the ins and outs of that particular supply chain, which probably involves things falling off of trucks out by the airport ...)

Ballet—and every other performing arts form—has managed to survive wars, plagues, and depressions. I have every confidence that it will survive Covid-19 too. Yes, it will sustain some real body blows and may very well look different when the dancers (and students!) can return to class and rehearsal, the theaters reopen, the audience feels safe, and the donors feel flush again, but it will be back.