Kathleen O'Connell

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.

Thanks for the link, Helene—I think Dr. Fuller is pretty good at laying out a complex topic for a non-scientific audience. I did chuckle at this description: "The way antibodies work is that they decorate the outsides of the pathogen, or the virus, and prevent the virus from being able to infect your cells." I'm having fun imagining pathogens festooned with antibodies like Christmas trees.

Well, on a more hopeful note, Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech announced today that they have begun US clinical trials on their jointly-developed Covid-19 vaccine candidate BNT162. (Now there's a name that rolls right off the tongue.) What's promising about BNT162 is that it's an RNA vaccine: if it works, it should be much easier to produce at scale than vaccines based on other platforms (e.g., live-attenuated vaccine, inactivated vaccines, subunit vaccines, or viral vector vaccines). The downside? So far no RNA vaccine has been approved for use in humans for an infectious disease. Still, a bright spot, and compounded by the fact that there are at least 17 other RNA vaccines targeting SARS-CoV-2, that virus that causes COVID-19 under development. Pfizer and BioNTech believe that they could produce the several million doses by September for use where most needed. (Hopefully, front line health care workers and other essential personnel, not basketball players and billionaires.)

No, No! You didn't come off as a crazy anti-pharma person at all, and I'm so sorry if my response was intemperate! Look, I worked in pharma for 2+ decades and even I don't have the best impression of the industry. I do have the tremendous respect for the front-line professionals who do their utmost to discover, develop, manufacture, and distribute safe and effective therapies. But, as with every industry , there's always a cohort who can't see past their own wallets or their desire to rocket up the corporate ladder. There are also dedicated professionals who get so invested in their promising compound, or their potentially breakthrough technology, or their possibly landmark deal that they can't shut down a failure even when it's flashing bright red warning lights at them. This is one of the things I'm worried about in our current situation—that one of the teams in pursuit of a vaccine, or a therapy, or a break-through production process won't acknowledge failure fast enough (for very human reasons) and we'll have wasted time and resources doubling down on a losing bet. Because I've seen so many promising therapies crash and burn despite the best efforts of crack teams of scientists and engineers, I'm reluctant to do more than embrace radical uncertainty, plan for the worst, and hope for the best.

I thought you were referring to pharmaceutical products as not being necessities. Apologies if I misinterpreted your comment.

I am optimistic that one of the many organizations working to discover and test a vaccine will in fact develop one that works. I expect that the first doses will be allocated towards front-line healthcare workers, and that those workers may in fact be part of the first rounds of human testing one the safety tests have been completed. I am much less sanguine that the capacity to produce vaccines specifically can be sufficiently ramped up in the short term to cover the developed world's population (US, Canada, Europe, Japan, South Korea, China) much less the developing world. Just thinking about the supply chain for things like adjuvants and production equipment makes my head ache. And, I would not want to be the person to tell an insulin dependent diabetic that there was no insulin because the world's capacity to produce sterile injectables had been commandeered for Covid-19. We can't even get hand santizer, toilet paper, and clorox wipes onto our grocery store shelves.

I worked in the pharmaceutical industry for over two decades. Yes, it's good at manufacturing. Nonetheless, producing sufficient doses of a Covid-19 vaccine to meet worldwide demand will be a challenge. The industry can't simply shift its manufacturing operations to a Covid-19 vaccine: it still has to manufacture all of the other pharmaceutical products that the world needs, and it can't ramp up capacity overnight. Sorry to be pessimistic. I hope I'm proven wrong.

Even if a safe and effective vaccine makes it through discovery and testing in relatively short order, actually manufacturing billions of doses will be a real challenge—especially if the world needs all the other kinds of vaccines that are administered on a routine basis as well. There are enough bottlenecks in the manufacturing process to throw up some real hurdles to worldwide production, distribution, and administration.

I enjoy the the solo and wildly creative I-have-too-much-time-on-my-hands little videos that pop up on TikTok, IG, and Twitter— e.g., Mary Neely's delightful recreations of famous musicals using whatever props and costumes she can cobble together from her own closets—but I agree that most of the "alone together" performing arts efforts can feel like rituals of grief even if their intention is to spark hope and community.

Not ballet! But ... one of the best things of this kind that I've seen yet. Stile Antico, a UK-based early music ensemble, performs a socially-distanced version of Thomas Tallis' 40 part a cappella motet Spem in alium (for eight small choirs of five voices each, each voice singing a different line). Since Stile Antico is only a 12 voice chorus, they each had to perform more than one voice part. Thanks to the magic of our digital age, they were able to record this version in isolation on their smartphones and make a video out of it. It's not as thrilling as hearing it live, but one big advantage to a video like this is that you can actually see how the different voices and choirs weave together to make the glorious whole. Here's Stile Antico's note to the video: "The word ‘quarantine’ derives from the 14th-century Venetian word quarantena, meaning ‘forty days’ – the length of time for which ships had to be isolated during the Black Death before their crews were allowed on shore. To mark forty days of lockdown in the UK, Stile Antico has created a socially-distanced video recording of Thomas Tallis’ legendary forty-part motet, Spem in alium, whose affirmative text and monumental musical confidence resonate in these troubled times. To produce the video, the twelve members of group each recorded multiple parts using smartphones in their own homes, and tenor Benedict Hymas painstakingly wove them together to create the final performance. The video premieres on YouTube on Saturday 2nd May at 10am London time." Here's their website - https://www.stileantico.co.uk Text & Translation Spem in alium nunquam habui Praeter in te, Deus Israel Qui irasceris et propitius eris et omnia peccata hominum in tribulatione dimittis Domine Deus Creator caeli et terrae respice humilitatem nostram I have never put my hope in any other but in Thee, God of Israel who canst show both wrath and graciousness, and who absolves all the sins of man in suffering Lord God, Creator of Heaven and Earth Regard our humility

I'm planning for the worst and hoping for the best.

This Ars Technica article is an excellent precis on vaccine discovery, testing, and production. Highly recommended.

I'm less concerned about the ability to ramp up anti-viral production than vaccine production. Unless the plan is to give everyone remdesivir prophylactically, we'll need many, many more doses of the vaccine than the anti-viral. The latter is a treatment for those already ill; the former will need to be administered to as many well people as possible.

Hmmm ... Well, I'm not going to challenge Dr Fauci, but producing 100s of millions of vaccine doses by January will be quite a feat.

The article you've linked to refers to a promising anti-viral, remdesivir, not a vaccine. Still good news, of course, since the drug shortened hospital stays by a few days for the patients who received it as opposed to the placebo.

This just hit my inbox from the NYPL: Dear Friends of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, To help researchers and the dance community during this trying time, we have developed and are sharing with you a guide for electronic resources available to all. This guide brings together items available through NYPL such as our collection of e-books, databases, and Digital Collections Portal. It also includes free and open databases from the internet, streaming services to find recordings of performances or documentaries, as well as guides on how to face this pandemic and what resources are available to help. Just follow the link below to discover a great book, or find an inspiring performance to watch! https://libguides.nypl.org/dance-division/remote-access Please be safe and well. Jerome Robbins Dance Division The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center 40 Lincoln Center Plaza, New York, NY 10023 212.870.1657 | x21657 Some of the resources listed on the webpage are only available to NYPL library card holders (e.g., some of the journal databases, the circulating ebook collection, etc.), but others are available to anyone with an internet connection. The page is actually pretty nicely organized. There is a row of tabs at the top to click on to access different categories of resources: Databases Through NYPL Open Resources E-Books Digital Collections and Permissions Streaming Dance Self-Care "Self-Care" includes online dance and yoga classes, so get those socially-distanced bodies moving, folks!

The Metropolitan Opera has announced that it will stream operas for free on its website: From the linked Gothamist article: All “Nightly Met Opera Streams” will begin at 7:30 p.m. and will remain available via the homepage of metopera.org for 20 hours.Gothamis Here's the schedule: Monday, March 16 – Bizet’s Carmen (Conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, starring Elīna Garanča and Roberto Alagna. Transmitted live on January 16, 2010.) Tuesday, March 17 – Puccini’s La Bohème (Conducted by Nicola Luisotti, starring Angela Gheorghiu and Ramón Vargas. Transmitted live on April 5, 2008.) Wednesday, March 18 – Verdi’s Il Trovatore (Conducted by Marco Armiliato, starring Anna Netrebko, Dolora Zajick, Yonghoon Lee, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky. Transmitted live on October 3, 2015.) Thursday, March 19 – Verdi’s La Traviata (Conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, starring Diana Damrau, Juan Diego Flórez, and Quinn Kelsey. Transmitted live on December 15, 2018.) Friday, March 20 – Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment (Conducted by Marco Armiliato, starring Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Flórez. Transmitted live on April 26, 2008.) Saturday, March 21 – Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (Conducted by Marco Armiliato, starring Anna Netrebko, Piotr Beczała, and Mariusz Kwiecien. Transmitted live on February 7, 2009.) Sunday, March 22 – Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (Conducted by Valery Gergiev, starring Renée Fleming, Ramón Vargas, and Dmitri Hvorostovsky. Transmitted live on February 24, 2007.) PS: I'm not sure there's enough worldwide bandwidth to accommodate everything that's going to have to happen on line! Lots of schools plan to use online distance learning; there's going to be an uptick in telemedicine; more people will be streaming entertainment in general, be it movies, TV, or online video games, etc etc etc!

I may be in a minority of one, but I don't find Ratmansky to be a particularly good storyteller, nor particularly adept at dramatic pacing, and this includes some of his reconstructed heritage works as well as his own narrative ballets. Namouna, for all its glorious nuttiness feels more like a coherent story to me than, say, The Tempest, perhaps because it riffs on so many of the tropes that characterize classic story ballets.

This is the thing I like the best about this version! My DVD has a little extra wherein the mime is explained to a group of school children who then go on to do it themselves. It's charming, but it also really helped me grok the Lilac Fairy as a mimed role rather than a danced one. There are aspects of the production—e.g., the women dancers' headdresses—that are evocative of the Javanese court. I'm a little uneasy about that given the history of Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia. That being said, it's a gorgeous production. Here's a look: