Kathleen O'Connell

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:

Roxane Gay makes a similar observation in an article entitled "White Fever Dreams: The distortions of black and brown lives in the white imagination." "The new staging seems quite forward-looking and inclusive but most of the creative and production team is comprised of white people. Ivo van Hove, Belgian, directs and Anne Teresa DeKeersmaeker, Dutch, choreographs this new staging. They are accomplished and talented, certainly, and they do bring a sharp and interesting energy to this revival. But how committed can a show be to genuine inclusion when people of color have little or no hand in the show’s artistic voice and direction? How authentic can the portrayals of people of color be when it is predominantly white people shaping those portrayals? The show’s attempts at inclusion are, at times, clumsily executed. The black Jets would have more solidarity with the Puerto Rican Sharks than the white Jets. That they don’t in this show is the misstep of people who did not bother to learn much about the cultures they tried to represent. During “Gee Officer Krupke,” there are, among others, images of the border wall between the United States and Mexico. It’s clear what they are trying to say but it is also cognitively dissonant because Puerto Rico is part of the United States, and it is an island and the show is set in present day. To flatten the experience immigration without nuance makes it seem like the show’s architects think all brown people and their experiences are interchangeable."

Thank you for this link! My gosh, what a glorious mover!

They are marble recreations of smaller figures by the early 20th century Polish-American sculptor Elie Nadelman. This is their backstory: The gigantic Elie Nadelman sculptures, Circus Women and Two Nudes, that dominate the Promenade were carved in Italy from a virgin vein of Carrara marble. They recreate smaller, 4-foot versions made of plaster and paper that were made by Nadelman decades before. The name of the actual Italian sculptor is lost to history. Overhearing construction workmen remarking on the naked "goils," Kirstein arranged to have the immense artworks brought into the Theater just before the fourth and final wall was closed up and before the Lincoln Center leadership could order their removal, which, in fact they did; but the statues could no longer be removed. They were here to stay. I happen to love them—especially "Circus Women" on the west end of the Promenade—but I gather they're not to everyone's taste. Meeting by the "East Fat Ladies" or the "West Fat Ladies" has been a thing ever since I can remember.

Google is your friend. It takes a minute or two to cut and paste a name into the search bar to make sure you're not posting a quote by someone odious, or who might at the very least be a lightning rod in your community. I learned this the hard way.

Given your knowledge of both Swan Lake and NYCB's dancers, I'm going to trust you on this! Presumably the company has enough of a connection to Ratmansky to give replacing Martins' version with his legitimacy.

Really? I guess I'm a sucker Carabosse and the Lilac Fairy.

Ideally, I'd prefer this course as well, but ballets like Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and Romeo and Juliet do get droves of people into the theater; newly-commissioned story ballets mostly don't. It's a version of the battle that opera companies and symphony orchestras have been fighting for decades, if not an actual century in the case of opera. (Go to the Metropolitan Opera Archives and click on "Repertory Report" in the left-hand sidebar. It's a list of operas in the Met's repertory sorted by total number of performances given. You have to scroll way down that list to get to an opera composed after the 1920's.) I don't think NYCB will likely become a home of 19th century or full-length ballets—it's just not in the company's DNA—so I'm not going to begrudge them doing one a season to put butts in seats if it means 1) filling the coffers and 2) expanding their audience. But yeah, I'd like to see them chart a different course if they could.