Kathleen O'Connell

I think I know who you mean. I've been handing him my tickets since at least 1978 and he does nod at me every time as if he knows who i am. Going to the ballet just won't feel the same when he retires.

Yup. They have been for w while now.

Helene -- Yes! Netrebko is a good analogy. Also, Cecilia Bartoli. And Renee Fleming.

I do think that ABT's long season at the Met is one of its challenges. As a theater, the Met is ill-suited to ballet. There is too much stage to fill and too many seats that are fine for listening to grand opera but lousy for watching ballet. (The acoustics at the top of the house are fantastic, but the action looks like it's taking place on a planet far, far away.) The kind of rep that works best there -- lavishly scaled story ballets -- is expensive to produce and difficult to cast. Not because the company doesn't have good dancers, but because the kind of dancer that can both fill the house and sell it to the back of that house in particular is relatively rare and requires the kind of cultivation ABT can't -- or doesn't -- offer. (How is Isabella Boylston, or any ballerina for that matter, supposed to get her arms around Giselle if she only dances it once a season?) Three weeks at The Theater Formerly Known as State, three weeks at the Rose Theater (in the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex in the Time Warner Center) and four weeks at the Met might allow the company to adjust its programming mix to give due honor to its "heritage" ballets, present its new commissions in an appropriately scaled venue, and, most important of all, get its most promising dancers front and center more often.

But she does wow people with her dancing. Many of them are not balletomanes, however, and I wonder if it isn't that as much as anything else that rankles Copeland's more vociferous detractors. An equivalent from another art form might be all the hyperventilating over Andrea Bocelli, Sarah Brightman, and Charlotte Church among the more fervent opera enthusiasts. Some of them lived to grab the newbies by their lapels and lecture them loud and long about why they couldn't, shouldn't ever enjoy a moment of Boccellii's singing and if they did it was only because he was a handsome blind guy the media sold to them and did they realize they were complicit in the death of real operatic singing? ETA: For the record, I want to make it clear that Copeland is a legitimate ballerina. Bocelli has a beautiful voice, but didn't receive the kind of training that would have made him a legitimate operatic tenor. They are alike primarily in their appeal to non-aficionados.

There's a fair and frank assessment of an artist's technique and artistry and then there's criticism couched in language that effectively equates technical or artistic limitations with some kind of moral failure. It's the latter I find troubling.

Twenty five years from now, Catazaro will be regaling an interviewer, or a table full of donors at a benefit, or a class full of aspiring danseurs with tales from his epic fail of an Apollo debut -- what went wrong, how it felt, what he learned, how it made him a better dancer (as it surely will) etc etc etc -- and everyone will go home well pleased with a story about a fine dancer whose artistry was tempered in the fire of a very public crisis.

I like Teresa Reichlen in the role very much, especially when partnered by Tyler Angle. I know she's a touch too tall for him, but I think their partnership -- which appears to have been shelved for now, alas -- was among NYCB's best in terms of rapport and drama. I didn't think this would turn out to be the case, but Reichlen has become my all around go-to NYCB Balanchine ballerina. I've come to prefer her in just about every Balanchine role she shares with someone else. I prefer a cooler style in general, however, so your mileage may vary.

Can you be specific about what you didn't like?

CBS' 60 Minutes segment on Misty Copeland is available for streaming here: http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/misty-copeland/ There's also an "Overtime" segment on two young African American twins at (I think) the JKO school who Copeland now mentors. Go here:http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/how-two-brooklyn-brothers-became-protgs-of-a-star/

I was frankly surprised that Martins extended his invitation via what looks to me like a form email sent out to who knows how many people, rather than just picking up the phone and calling her to discuss his initiative and the role he wanted her to play in it himself. Yes, he's a busy man, but if the initiative is important to SAB and the group of alumni is really select he might have found the time rather than delegating the call to an underling.

Totally OT, Drew, but has NYCB managed to get the video itself into the FB newsfeed, or just a link to the video? If the former, even better -- that's how it will have the most éclat.

Compare ABT's reticence on this point to NYCB's recent (or at least new to me) tactic of making video footage of recent performances available to The New York Times for placement adjacent to reviews. (Go here for footage of Ashley Bouder and Taylor Stanley in Square Dance. And here for footage of Theresa Reichlen and Sara Mearns in Concerto Barocco.) I rather get the impression that NYCB is so interested in making sure that you see what all the fuss is about that they've decided to save you the trouble of going to their own website or searching on YouTube. I haven't checked to see if NYCB has found a way of getting its video content inserted into folks' Facebook news feeds, but if it has, so much the better. ABT needs to figure out how to make a fuss over its dancers! (Rather than relying on the "Star Strategy" -- their characterization, not mine -- articulated by CFO William Taylor in the now deleted Babson College video. I'm not an AD, but that strategy sounds like an artistic dead end to me.)

Cynical because the news organizations that feature Copeland's story are happy to talk to her and about her, but won't commit the resources it would take to do real reporting on the issue, or any issue in the arts for that matter.

No problem - I wasn't as clear as I might have been. Conversing online in text only has its delights and its challenges.

I wasn't asking you to. I simply wanted to state that I didn't think I was among your non-respondents, at least not knowingly.

When asked a direct question, always make an effort to respond.

To what extent is Copeland's press "self initiated"? I'm going to be cynical and suggest that the media look at Copeland and see the perfect feel-good, triumph over adversity, you go girl story to fill all that airtime and generate all those page views. It doesn't hurt that she's an attractive, well-spoken woman who has genuinely achieved something. (Any dancer who gets into a top ballet company has achieved something.) So yes, they're going to make a fuss. If I were her, and wanted to be a role model for young women of color and champion diversity in ballet, I'd be working my 15 minutes for everything they were worth, too. I do not doubt for a moment that there are now new donors who will write checks for Project Plié or similar programs because Copeland asked them to or inspired them to. (Actually, Copeland has had more than 15 minutes, which is to her credit.) I don't view Copeland's media efforts as a sinister, unseemly campaign to get promoted to Principal. That being said, given ABT's alleged* "Star Strategy" it doesn't hurt to demonstrate to the CFO that you can put butts in seats. *I say "alleged" mostly because I'm not sure how accurately William Taylor's comments in the Babson video represented ABT's actual policies, although it doesn't look good ....

Do you think Copeland is boastful or lack humility? What are some specific things that she has said that give you that impression? If she wants to reach an audience of girls and young women of color, why should she decline to go where those girls are, which is social media?

No more shameless than Leopold Mozart or Franz Liszt or Andy Warhol or any other artist who has carefully crafted their image for maximum public éclat. One makes one's own luck, as they say. I've got no problem with artists taking their careers into their own hands. Who is "the other side" that's not getting their due?

Oh, David Brooks. Well, it must be so then. Artists have been engaged in more or less shameless self promotion since Leopold Mozart started dragging his little prodigies from one end of Europe to the other. Liszt raised it to a high art.

Just out of curiosity, who do you have in mind?

Or, assign numbers to the corps dancers and have wardrobe stitch them on to all the costumes ... Pay honor to your brightest stars by retiring their numbers when they retire.

May I steal this?

RIP to Professor Abrams, and to the dogeared and heavily underlined copy of The Mirror and the Lamp that followed me faithfully through college, graduate school, and beyond but finally had to be laid to rest when its binding was beyond repair. The Mirror and the Lamp is Amazon's #1 bestseller in "British and Irish Literary Criticism" after being in print for more than 60 years - quite an achievement, that.