Kathleen O'Connell

4 minutes ago, harpergroup said:

 

They've got Cameron Dieck as another Rothbart.  So they're going with the tall dancers now - these three are amongst the tallest of the current crop of corps men.

Good.

Re Farley: he was one of Aurora's four suitors way back when he was still (I think) an apprentice. He was hands down the most princely prince on the stage, and not an obvious candidate for Von Rotbart.

1 hour ago, CharlieH said:

I'm thinking of going to NY for the "21st C Choreographers" (Fall 2017 Gala) program, which includes four world premieres + a Martins work that I've not yet seen, Chairman Dances. Can anybody shed light on the four choreographers who are creating the new ballets? Other than Justin Peck, I've read very little about them. Even Peck's output seems to be spotty - some great (like Year of the Rabbit), others not so (Most Incredible Thing). What have regular NYCB audiences loved (or not) about the various choreographers?

All four choreographers are young - very young in the case of Gianna Reisen, who was still an SAB student when the gala commission was announced in April. Who knows what kind of choreographer she is or will become?

Lauren Lovette, who is an NYCB principal and an alum of The New York Choreographic Institute, has only recently begun to refocus her attention on choreography. The work presented at the gala will be her second for NYCB. Her first , For Clara, premiered at last year's gala. My take, based on For Clara: her work shows real promise. I got the impression that she didn't want to leave anything on the cutting room floor, however: the ballet seemed more than a bit overstuffed for a 15 minute work. (The music Lovette chose — Schumann's Introduction and Concert Allegro — seems to change tone and texture about every 16 bars, and may have compounded matters.) I'm happy to write it off as a novice's mis-step, and a not at all unusual one. I don't think I need to see For Clara again, but I would like to see another Lovette ballet. 

Although Troy Schumacher is an NYCB soloist, he built his choreographic career outside of of the company: he started his own arts collective in 2010 which evolved into his current company, BalletCollective. To my eye, Schumacher's work is characterized by a strong sense of community amongst the dancers on stage. (This is one of the things that characterizes him as a dancer, too: he always seems to be deeply present in the world being created on stage. If you want to know who or what to look at in a sea of dancers, follow his gaze.) I've enjoyed what I've seen of his work, both for BalletCollective and NYCB; my biggest reservation is this: a lot of his ballets, in one form or another, seem to take place on a playground full of overgrown kids and I'd like to see him explore a different kind of community. Every now and then I think he needs to change up his palette of textures too, or at least slow things down.

I'm a Peck fan. Even his misfires give me something to think about. I never mind it when one of his ballets is on the program, even if it's one I wasn't crazy about. I am absolutely crazy about the second movement of his Rodeo, however.

PS: if the past is any guideline, all four gala premieres are likely to be on the short side.

I'll see your Flintstones theme and raise you the Jetsons 

 Even if you're not a comics fan, I do recommend checking out DC Comics' 2016 - 2017 Flintstones reboot, which mines both the original franchise's playful riffs on 20th century technology and the current discontents of 21st century late-stage capitalism for all they are worth.

It looks like an ad for Swarosvki. They even have a Swan Collection.

And of course they did the tiaras and, if I recall correctly, the costume beading for the new Symphony in C costumes. The promotion of the latter featured Sara Mearns; coincidentally (or maybe not) the Swan Queen depicted in the new ad does resemble her.

Just sayin' ...

PS: I wouldn't mind a tie-in with Swarovski if the ad did a better job of selling NYCB's Swan Lake. I find the ad pretty, but rather inert - and it's not something I'd be inclined to watch again.

Even worse, about inert statues in tiaras!

Still, it's prettier than the production ...

AARGHHH! Where are the national dance education and advocacy organizations?

The advent of live / high definition broadcasts in local movie theaters surely has the potential to expand the reach of the performing arts to places that might not ever host a large touring ballet or opera company.

For example: you can buy tickets now for the April 8, 2018 screening of the Bolshoi Ballet's Giselle in local cineplexes in Billings MT (pop 110,323), Fargo ND (pop 120,762), and Kennewick WA (pop 73,917). These same theaters are also screening the Metropolitan Opera's HD broadcasts.

How to get folks there? All of these smaller cities have dance academies who could help promote it as a festive, must-see family event. So could the local schools. They might even persuade a local philanthropist or civic group to subsidize the ticket price for needy students. Honestly, if I were a foundation with an interest in promoting the performing arts I'd be all over opportunities like this -- not as a replacement for live performance, but as a way to serve audiences who might not have the easy opportunity to see something live.

1 hour ago, CharlieH said:

 

Back in the '60s, though, watching a quality TV event w/ family was just a normal thing that a middle-class family did, even if they did not have a particular passion for the arts.  It was done just as kids and parents circled around the TV to hear a Presidential Oval Office address in the old days...or rallying 'round the radio for FDR's fireside chats. 

Ummm ... not mine.

My parents gave me what opportunities to engage with the arts that they could, but honestly, sitting down to watch a "quality TV event" was not one of them.  Our 60's family TV watching was mostly Walt Disney, the Flintstones, the Jetsons, and Perry Mason. 

A parent, or grandparent, or aunt, or uncle, or any adult who wanted to introduce a child to the performing arts has a wealth of tools with which to do so, none of which were available to my parents:

1) Buy some DVDs.

2) Borrow some DVDs from the library.

3) Stream something from YouTube or Vimeo or an arts' organizations own streaming service on any device with a screen, including a TV (either a smart TV or a not-so-smart one hooked up to a Roku box, or a Firestick, or a Chromecast device). 

4) Attend a live HD broadcast in a movie theater, or, depending on the municipality, at a local library or school auditorium.

All it takes is wanting to do it.

1 hour ago, Drew said:

Are more than a few of the SAB graduates who get into NYCB "pure" SAB products? I was vaguely under the impression that many of the dancers not only  started elsewhere, but in some cases came to SAB mid-training or even towards the end of their training. 

Even a cursory look at the dancers' bios suggest that that is indeed the case. 

la Cour = 2002 - joined as corps, previously corps at RDB

De Luz = 2003 - joined as soloist, previously soloist at ABT

Garcia = 2007 - joined as principal, previously principal at SFB

I think maybe that's it on the current roster?

Charles Askegard joined NYCB as a soloist from ABT, where he'd danced for 10 years. He did train for one summer at SAB, however.

8 hours ago, pherank said:

Sorry if this sounds like babble - this stuff gets to be pretty complicated so I'm just giving you a basic explanation.
 

 

No worries - I'm an old who codes. 

The cookies and cashes are flushed regularly; all the back-ups are encrypted; the trackers are blocked; the passwords are managed; the hard drive is cloned regularly; and a VPN invoked when appropriate. And still, I'm vulnerable. 

I'm a board member and the volunteer administrator of a small performing arts non-profit. We use MailChimp to distribute our concert announcements; we don't even turn on all the tracking that we could, and we know a surprising amount about what happens when someone receives one of our emails. 

Oh, yeah - no Facebook.

Saskia Beskow, who retired from the NYCB corps in 2009, was trained in Denmark joined NYCB as a corps member from the Royal Danish Ballet.

She was a truly lovely dancer and one of those corps stalwarts you'd see in three ballets on the same night, night after night.

40 minutes ago, sandik said:

 

I'd never heard the term "aria de sorbetto," but I am bound and determined to add it to my vocabulary.  My sister and I are always talking about where in the action movie we should just get up and go to the bathroom (years of taking children to the movies) -- sounds like I have just the right term now!

 Naturally, there is an app for that: http://runpee.com

46 minutes ago, Drew said:

I'm afraid I don't know the 1877 libretto   but obviously I should check it out!

Here's a full synopsis: http://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/Swan_Lake#cite_note-note20-1

55 minutes ago, nanushka said:

Indeed, it is always useful to remember that the conventions of audience behavior/attention/etc. were very different in earlier eras, and that those differences had a significant impact on the expectations, choices and values of creators, artists and audiences.

 

I realized this when I first read Stendahl's The Charterhouse of Parma. I think half the meaningful dialogue takes place in an opera box while an opera is in progress!

7 minutes ago, pherank said:

 

It's the reverse situation that isn't really doable - Facebook can't know for certain what happens when a user clicks on a Facebook ad and then leaves their site. If that makes sense.

 

By "their site" do you mean Facebook's?

I'm under the impression that Facebook's user identification and tracking tools allow it to follow users all over the web. When one logs onto Facebook, it creates a "signature" that combines one's Facebook ID, browser, IP address, and device and stores that signature on its servers. It will even build up a dossier of all of the IP addresses and devices via which users accesses their Facebook accounts so they can be tracked from all their devices, browsers, and IP addresses. Whenever that user visits a webpage with a Facebook tracking pixel or some other Facebook tracking tool on it, the tracker sends the data back to Facebook. Doesn't this generate a pretty comprehensive map of where that user has been and what they did there? 

If I log on to Facebook, click on (or even just view) an ad, then leave Facebook to wander around the web and eventually land on the advertiser's site, unless I'm using a tracking blocker (such as Ghostery, eg) , Facebook is going to know. It's also going to know what I did when I got there - including not doing anything.

Am I missing something?

14 hours ago, sandik said:

 

My theory (you knew I had to have one) is that Swan Lake is actually two different ballets.  The earthly acts (1 and 3) are echt Petipa with set pieces and novelty acts all over the place.  Yes, there are some characters, and they have some plot, but mostly it's about the technical thrill.  The drama is melodrama, and sits separately from the virtuosic material, almost like aria and recitative in opera.  The unearthly acts (2 and 4) are long aria-like sequences that reflect back onto the spiritual imagery of the Romantic period.  They aren't specifically recreations of Romantic era materials, but they reflect that work, both technically and narratively. 

 

I think you gave my rant more thought than it deserved!

Yours is a helpful reminder that at a certain point in time, a ballet was intended to be a SHOW: spectacle, pyrotechnic display, melodrama, nods to the memes of the day (spectral maidens), specialty acts (national dances) etc. The formal elements -- the standard pas-de-deux with alternating variations and a coda; the entertainment-within-an-entertainment divertissements; the white acts; happy peasants dancing for the royals; etc. -- kept the proceedings legible: everybody knew what to expect when. I wonder if we've lost some of that legibility as directors have pushed and pulled some of these story ballets out of shape?

I wonder if there was a ballet equivalent to opera's aria di sorbetto: an aria for a secondary character that does nothing to advance the plot but does give you a chance to grab a snack before the evening ends.

8 minutes ago, pherank said:

 

Has anyone read a discussion on Ballet Alert that induced them to go to a show that they otherwise would not have known about, or cared to purchase a ticket for?

 

 

Absolutely!

1 hour ago, pherank said:

"Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram have a robust array of tools for marketers that would allow a ballet company to make a pretty direct link between ad views and subsequent ticket purchases"

— Dancer's social media postings are not the same kind of information though. The only sure fire way to do this is to track clicks on promotion hyperlinks that link directly to online ticket forms. And it is possible to track whether the same IP address arrived at the ticket form and submitted it, or whether they didn't actually go through with the transaction.
 

OK, I just took a deep dive into Facebook's advertising support pages. I too thought that ad conversion tracking required a user to actually click on an ad, but no: Facebook will also track and attribute a conversion based on ad impressions - i.e., a user simply viewing an ad.

From the "How does Facebook attribute actions to my ads?" page:

"Facebook credits (or attributes) actions to your ad if someone viewed or clicked your ad and then took an action within a specified time period."

"We report actions based on impressions (views) of your ad and clicks on your ad:

Clicks: A person clicked your ad and took an action. This is called click-through attribution.

Impressions: A person saw your ad, didn't click it, but took an action within the attribution window. This is called view-through attribution."

"Facebook credits an action to your ad if someone viewed or clicked your ad and then took a desired action (ex: purchased a product on a website) within a specified number of days. The number of days between when a person viewed or clicked your ad and then subsequently took an action is called an attribution window."

Provided the company has enabled (and paid for) the right kind of tracking, Facebook will flag the purchase (and claim a conversion) even if the user only viewed the ad - no need to click through!

39 minutes ago, pherank said:

"If Facebook wanted to tell NYCB how many Sara Mearns followers also bought an NYCB ticket, it could probably do so within a reasonable margin of error"

— That's what companies would like to know, but I'm going to argue that it would require an NSA-level of intrusiveness to actually determine the effectiveness of the 3rd party (dancer's) Instagram postings. And, that is one reason why ballet companies still rely upon "user satisfaction" and feedback surveys to find out who actually did what, when and why. And plenty of people don't want to fill those out online, or in the mail, or don't supply their email addresses and only purchase tickets from the ticket box, etc.

"Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram have a robust array of tools for marketers that would allow a ballet company to make a pretty direct link between ad views and subsequent ticket purchases"

— Dancer's social media postings are not the same kind of information though. The only sure fire way to do this is to track clicks on promotion hyperlinks that link directly to online ticket forms. And it is possible to track whether the same IP address arrived at the ticket form and submitted it, or whether they didn't actually go through with the transaction.

There are so many variables in all of this. When Dancer Z posts, "Arriving in Mexico today" and an Instagram follower comments, "OMG! I didn't know you were performing here! I want to go." What is a software analysis program to make of these conversations? I would estimate that at least 95% of the postings and comments never rise above this level of specificity/vagueness. Now, ballet companies and gala committees may start pressuring their dancers to write posts that are more effective at guiding people to online ticket purchases forms, but I can imagine the dancers will mostly balk at being part of the sales and marketing machinery of ballet organizations. They are looking for a space to talk about general feelings and impressions about absolutely anything (including politics, btw).

Yes to point one; that is why I said Facebook doesn't (to the best of my knowledge) supply non-anonymized user profile data to its customers. That it could do so, I have no doubt.

Re point two: I thought I was careful to draw a distinction between a company's official pages and ads and its dancers' personal social media postings. I guess not. 

I absolutely agree that companies should not require their dancers post promotional content in their personal accounts. That being said, Facebook and Instagram would no doubt serve a dance company ad to a user who was actively following one of the company's dancers, liked one of their posts, or shared it with their network. A personal account can be leveraged for promotion simply by giving Facebook or Instagram useful ad-targeting information. And of course dance companies can themselves share a dancer's personal content as a means of increasing reach. 

1 minute ago, nanushka said:

 

Even when a work has a narrative, that to me is not "the engine of meaning." It's more like an underlying structure on which meaning is then built up through the emotional and associational resonances of dance movement. 

I don't think this is very much different from what I was referring to with "engine of meaning." The plot is the mechanism by which the characters reveal themselves to us; they are what they do (or don't do, as the case may be) and how they do it.

To me, a non-narrative ballet depicts or evokes an emotional state or a state of mind; it doesn't tell us much about what provoked that state of mind beyond the basics: "we're in love!" or "I grieve." A narrative ballet places that emotional state in the context of some specific action or situation: "the guy I don't love just informed me that the guy I do love has betrayed me and I am so out of my mind with grief that I will now proceed to dance myself to death."

I don't ask for much plot; as Balanchine put it, how much story do you need? But I do draw the line at some things: a racist plot would be one. A frothy plot is fine; a contrived one less so. Plots also imply a moral arc: some are worth attending to; some are better off abandoned.

And I absolutely agree with you regarding the affective potential of dance: it is body language in its most potent form. It is ideally suited to the ineffable. 

14 minutes ago, Fleurfairy said:

Agreed. This is getting ridiculous. Now we're offended when black dancers are cast? Btw, Von Rothbart was one of Albert Evans' signature and favorite roles. Maybe Martins and the ballet masters have found that Chamblee and Farley have the theatricality needed to portray an over-the-top villain. 

Nope. I'm offended if dancers are cast because they are black. 

12 hours ago, pherank said:

It's not all that easy to even relate Instagram followers (plus the people who regularly visit certain Instagram pages, but aren't "followers") to something like ticket subscriptions. It can be a way to create some amount of "buzz" around an event, but converting to actual ticket sales is another matter.

Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram have a robust array of tools for marketers that would allow a ballet company to make a pretty direct link between ad views and subsequent ticket purchases, e.g., the Facebook Pixel and Offline Conversions API. Now, this applies to the company's own Facebook page and ads, but I would be shocked if Facebook, via its ubiquitous and exquisitely fine-tuned tracking tools, couldn't link someone who, say, liked Sara Mearns' Instagram feed to someone who bought a ticket to NYCB. That's how they make their money: they sell ads based on their ability to serve them to exactly the right people; and to know who those people are, Facebook tracks everything they touch online and off. (To be clear: Facebook uses this info itself; I don't believe it makes the individual profiles it compiles available to third parties.)  If NYCB or ABT or any other company decided it wanted to advertise on Facebook or Instagram (and they may well do so already), those ads would end up in the feed of likely prospects. If Facebook wanted to tell NYCB how many Sara Mearns followers also bought an NYCB ticket, it could probably do so within a reasonable margin of error.

Facebook also offers any number of tools to monitor engagement. If a company doesn't know the age, gender, and location of the people viewing its page or what content gets the best response or what people do after they see it, its not because Facebook isn't telling them. 

This Washington Post article identifies the "98 personal data points that Facebook uses to target ads to you." It's pretty startling. 

If I were a ballet company, I'd be creating as much shareable social media content as my budget would allow.