Kathleen O'Connell

To me "Ashley" is and always will be Merrill Ashley.

I hadn't realized that figure skaters were also referred to by their first names. It doesn't surprise me, since figure skating has a lot in common with ballet, not the least of which is the youth of even its most accomplished practitioners and the fact that its spotlight shines brightest on its female stars. It wouldn't surprise me if it were the same for gymnasts, come to think of it.

Many years ago Michael Crabb wrote a piece about solo dancer Margie Gillis and the late Christopher Gillis, then a member of the Paul Taylor company, for Maclean's magazine. Normally the practice at Maclean's is to use the surname only after the initial introduction, but in the case of siblings with the same surname, this was not feasible. Crabb elected to refer to them as Margie and Christopher rather than Ms. Gillis and Mr. Gillis, and I found this jarring in the magazine's context and inappropriately familiar.

Oh, this is a difficult aspect, isn't it? The NYT is very clear about using Mr or Ms after the first reference (which resulted in one of my favorite examples in a discussion about Rocky Horror Picture Show and the actor/musician Mr Loaf). In general, I like the last name only after the first reference, in part because I have a limited word count and I don't want to squander any of it, but it does make things hard when you have multiples of a last name. At least with the Gillises they could have used M Gillis and C Gillis -- I'm always stuck when I have to discuss Seth and Sara Orza.

I do agree with you, though, about the familiarity that first names imply. I've always thought that first names should be reserved for discussing personal relationships -- if I'm talking about my friendship with an artist, I can call them by their first name. But if I'm talking about their work, I like the distance that last names confer.

Hear! Hear!

Way back in the late 70's or early 80's Dance Magazine (I think) published an article entitled "May I Call You Farrell?" on the anomalous and rather peculiar convention of referring to ballet dancers by their first names -- something that's done with absolutely no other category of artist that I'm aware of. I personally find the practice as grating as fingernails on a chalkboard. If we were discussing the work of say, Nobel laureates Alice Munro or Toni Morrison, whether formally in a published review or less formally in a blog post or, you know, on an internet forum, we wouldn't refer to them as "Alice" and "Toni." We probably wouldn't be so formal as to follow the NYT's convention of first referring to them "Ms. Munro" or "Ms. Morrison," but after a first reference using their full names, we'd refer to them as "Munro" and "Morrison." Then why "Wendy" rather than "Whelan"? Or "Ashley" rather than [fill in the name of what seems to be about half the ballerinas under 30]. Even opera, an art form that engenders the same kind of personal identification with and investment in its performers, doesn't really go there. It's not "the Maria / Renata wars" for instance.

I don't think it's just an age thing. I was listening to a tech podcast the other day in which the two youngish (male) hosts were discussing Jill Lepore's New Yorker article on Clay Christensen and disruption. They consistently referred to them as "Professor Lepore" and "Professor Christensen" throughout -- even though one of them had co-authored a book with Christensen. I was thoroughly charmed. That being said, there is an awful lot of chatter among tech writers, podcasters, and fanboys about "Steve," "Jony," and "Tim" (There are two prominent Steves in tech, but "Steve" is never Steve Ballmer ...)

And she's "Secretary Clinton" to me, no matter what the bumper stickers say ...

Oh, Parma, that takes me back! We lived in the South for a time when I was a teenager (w-a-a-a-y back in the late 60's / early 70's) and it was also not uncommon for people refer to older men with whom they a friendly and respectful relationship as "Mr." plus their first names -- "Mr. Robert," e.g., or even "Mr. Bob" if "Bob" was how everyone knew him. One wouldn't refer to someone in a position of authority that way in public -- if Mr. Bob was your teacher, you'd never call him that in the classroom (in the classroom his name was "Sir") -- but in the private sphere, "Mr. Bob" was how you demonstrated both affection and respect.

ABT Fan, I totally agree with you about Shayer's potential. As far as I'm concerned, he (and Thomas Forster) made Clear worth watching.

Thank you kbarber!

IPA! IPA! I only know the subset of the symbols that appear most often in singers' diction guides, and keep promising myself to learn more, because it is a very cool system.

I'd used all caps for DEE and DAY mostly to emphasize the different pronunciations of the vowel sounds -- but now I see that that's confusing, and why we need expert systems!

My favorite example of different dances to the same music is Balanchine's "Concerto Barocco" and Paul Taylor's "Esplanade." (Taylor only uses the last two movements, however -- the Largo and Allegro.)

I enjoyed Peck's 'Rōdē,ō: Four Dance Episodes * but it's been decades since I've seen De Mille's Rodeo. I thought Peck's second episode was particularly beautiful. It's a pas de cinq that evokes a band of sylphs rather than a corral full of cowboys. The men get to show off their beautiful arabesques and port-de-bras rather than their athletic prowess, which is just fine by me.

It's the second excerpt here.

What you see first does make a difference. My first Dying Swan was Mme. Ida Nevasayneva, and let's just say her performance is the lens through which I see everyone else's.

*A title that demands to be cut-and-pasted, because who can remember how to type those diacritical marks and where the damn comma goes. I presume it's done this way so we say ro-DEE-o, not ro-DAY-o ... I guess we should be thankful he didn't randomly capitalize some of the other letters.

I meant your repertory listing, not my index, but thanks! A budget filter certainly helps and I'm glad to see Dance/USA providing this service.

I knew what you meant, but I really did want to commend you for trying to keep an index of company websites going. Even today it's not easy to pull together a comprehensive list, and I'm very glad Dance/USA has committed some resources into making it happen. I use their list all the time now.

I know a little of what you are up against... having started the first index of Dance websites [performed not social] as a service to the community at a time when most of us discussing ballet on the internet had not yet seen a webpage... By the time Google was invented, keeping up was already out of reach...

But if it could be done, how exciting!!! Even if it were only put up once, it would be fascinating!

You were a pioneer! Well, thank you! Fortunately, the folks at Dance/USA picked up where you left off. (The link takes you to Dance/USA's National Company Roster, a listing of all known 501c3 dance companies in the U.S. with expense budgets greater than $100,000 for fiscal years ending in 2012.)

Would you post that data once youmwebcrawled it together? I'd be interested to see it!

Nothing would make me happier than to put the data I gather up someplace where it would be readily available, but please don't hold your breath!

1) This is a hobby. Some people garden, some people golf, I fool around with data. (Once a spreadsheet jockey, always a spreadsheet jockey ... and I'm particularly committed to the intersection of art and money, if that hasn't been clear from many of my posts.) Sometimes -- indeed, most times -- other things take priority.

2) I don't yet have a lot confidence in the tools or in my ability to use them well.

3) Just because information has been published on an organization's website doesn't mean I have the right to scrape it, parse it, and re-distribute it. That's something I have to investigate further. I'm grateful that companies like NYCB have put time, money and effort into making detailed information about their repertory readily available; I don't want to abuse their generosity. I certainly don't want to re-publish anything that's likely under copyright -- e.g., the descriptive text and program notes that NYCB has posted on its repertory pages -- even though it's the easiest thing in the world to pull them off of its website and dump them into a file.

4) I need a reliable place to put the data in a format that people can actually use and I can easily maintain. I haven't even begun to sort this one out. Sure, I could dump everything into a Google Docs spreadsheet, put it up on Google Drive, and share the link -- that's a fast and cheap solution, but not necessarily the best one if user-friendliness is my goal.

But I really am trying to figure out how to do this dance data thing.

Kathleen you are a tech wizard

Nah. I have been defeated by the deadly confluence of iPhoto, iCloud, and Camera Roll. I need to borrow a thirteen year old from time to time to explain my phone to me.

I used Import.io to extract a table of ballets listed on NYCB's repertory page and got 527 entries, beginning with "A la Françaix" and ending with "Zenobia (Pas de Deux)." That seems like enough to cover both company commissions and "imports."

Import.io has a suite of very neat (and free!) tools for extracting webpage data. I'm trying to master their crawler tool so I can create a database of repertory by dance company. It's a bit fiddly, but seems doable for the more well-organized sites, like NYCB's.

I'd be curious to learn what percentage of ballets commissioned by NYCB actually have a long life after their premiere, either at NYCB or elsewhere in other ballet companies. 422 is certainly a high number, and we're already way past that number now. I wonder what number is assigned to Peck's new Rode'o. We tend to remember the hits, but there have also been many, many duds along the way.

An interesting topic to explore, and if I ever get my data-mining and analysis skills up to snuff, I'd love to do it ... because I actually think ballet as an art form is blessed in this regard. Ballet today is more like opera when Pacini, Donizetti and Rossini were composing than opera today is. By which I mean a lot of new stuff gets made -- and made fast -- with the understanding that much of it likely won't live forever, and that that's OK. Everyone involved gets a chance to hone their craft because even a bad ballet needn't be a career-ending catastrophe.

If I read the opening credits correctly, this work is the 422nd new work by the company. I cannot find my notes from the screening, but perhaps someone here remembers the exact phrasing -- it was quite specific.

You are correct. Here's a quote from the Ballet 422 website: "With unprecedented access to an elite world, the film follows Peck as he collaborates with musicians, lighting designers, costume designers and his fellow dancers to create NYCB’s 422nd new ballet."

It's NYCB 422nd new ballet. I don't know if that means the 422nd ballet NYCB has commissioned or the 422nd ballet that's new to NYCB. If the former it may exclude ballets Balanchine (or Robbins or Martins or whoever) choreographed for someone else first then imported into NYCB.

I'll get into this later, but I suspect Lipes wanted us to think it was the former, i.e., that we were observing a process the company had gone through 421 times before, even if it was a relatively new experience for Peck.

ETA from the trailer: "At only 25, Justin Peck has been commissioned to create the Company's 422nd original ballet." I'm taking that to mean ballets commissioned by and created at NYCB.

Trust me, the Bizet makes a lovely "outtro." The few moments we get from Concerto DSCH are rather still ones -- they have a very "introductory" feel even if they aren't from the exact beginning of the ballet -- and seeing them against the opening bars of Symphony in C's second movement works surprisingly well.

I have some thoughts about the title and how it relates to the whole film, which I hope to get to later.

I would think that there are recordings of Shostakovich's Concerto No. 2 in the public domain especially from before 1989 when copyrights were not strictly enforced between Russia and the US.

There may well be a Soviet-era recording out there that no one is bothering to defend against infringement, but what matters in this case is the copyright on the orchestral score. Per the International Music Score Library Project website (an awesome source for downloadable public domain scores), all of Shostakovich's works are still under copyright in the EU, Canada and Japan. Given its date of composition (1957) it is highly likely that the score is still under copyright in the U.S. as well, unless the publisher in possession of the U.S. rights totally fell down on the job when it came time to renew the original copyright at the end of its initial term.

It's a bit off topic, but here's a summary of the 1909 US copyright law as amended in 1976 and 1998 (the latter the infamous Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, derisively nicknamed "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act" for reasons you can guess …)

• Works published before 1923: In the public domain
• Works published between 1923 and 1963: Initial term 28 years. But, if the copyright was renewed in the 28th year, the work enters the public domain 95 years after publication. (For example, a work originally published in 1923 that had its copyright renewed in 1951 wouldn’t enter the public domain until 2018)
• Works published between 1964 and 1977: Copyright term is 95 years.
• Works created after 12/31/1977:

1) One author: Life + 70 years

2) Joint authors: life of the last surviving author + 70 years

3) Works for hire: The shorter of 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation

4) Anonymous / Pseudonymous authors: The shorter of 95 years from publication or 120 from creation, but, if the author is discovered, life + 70 years

Anyway, I just saw Ballet 422 and here's my guess as to why Lipes used the second movement from Bizet's Symphony in C instead of the Shostakovich Piano Concerto: we get only a brief glimpse of the opening moments of Concerto DSCH -- just enough to establish that Peck performed in it on the same very night that his own work premiered. (Paz De La Jolla opened the program; Concerto DSCH closed it.) At that point, the film ends and we get the closing credits over an exterior shot that pulls back from the Lincoln Center fountain to an overhead view of the whole plaza (or most of it). I think it would have been jarring to hear a few bars of the Shostakovich and then transition to something else for the closing credits. The Bizet strikes me as being better closing credit music than the Shostakovich. For those in the know, it's closely associated with NYCB; for those not in the know, it's a striking theme that is very evocative of ballet in general -- it sounds Swan Lakey without actually being Swan Lake. If we saw five whole minutes of DSCH, I might have felt differently, but in this case I think that the mismatch between the ballet we saw and the score we heard was OK.

Thanks for the above report. What a shame about not being able to see any substantial part of Peck's ballet in the documentary, so different from the wonderful early-1980s film about Choo-San Goh's creation for ABT (CONFIGURATIONS to Barber's piano concerto). That film finished with a full performance of Goh's ballet for Baryshnikov et. al.

I'll likely still see Ballet 422 for the NYCB dancers but it sounds as if a big part of the story will be missing.

Again, not showing substantial selections from the finished work may well be as much a rights issue as a directorial choice. Martinu's Sinfonietta la Jolla is definitely not in the public domain, so Lipes would likely have had to obtain a license from the publisher (Boosey & Hawkes) to use it in his film. "Obtain a license" usually means "pay a fee." NYCB has the rights to perform Sinfonietta la Jolla in a theater before a live audience, obviously, but it may well not have the right to record its performance of the work. (Recording rights are't necessarily conveyed by the mere purchase or rental of a score; in some cases -- with a "study score" e.g. -- neither are performance rights.) And, even if NYCB does have the rights to record the work, the terms of its contract with the orchestra's musicians might require it to pay them additional compensation if their performance is included in a film or broadcast.

Then there's the question of the rights to perform and record Paz de La Jolla, the ballet. It could be that NYCB, not Peck, holds those rights and that it decided not to license them to Lipes for use in Ballet 422. There are plenty of good reasons for not doing so, not the least of which is a reluctance to cede control over the quality and distribution of your core artistic product to someone else. NYCB may have great regard for Lipes' talents as a documentary filmmaker, but may have less faith in his ability to film and edit a dance performance or to keep Paz de la Jolla off of YouTube. And who knows -- maybe Peck holds the rights and decided for reasons of his own not to license them to Lipes.

So, Lipes might not have had enough money to license the rights he needed or the rights holders might have been unwilling to grant them at any price, or at a price Lipes could afford to pay.

And of course, it could be that Lipes was simply interested in capturing the process rather than the product, and the film is as it is because he wanted it that way.

There were also a few things I really didn't like ... The other was Lipes final shot, which was of Concerto DSCH (which Justin is preparing to dance) with Bizet's Symphony in C (NOT its music) playing over the visuals.

This may simply have been the result of a rights issue. The music for DSCH (Shostakovich's Concerto No. 2 in F Major, Op. 102) is almost certainly not in the public domain given its date of composition (1957). I would have thought that using a few minutes of the music in a film would have been allowed under the fair use doctrine, but perhaps not. Lipes might not have had enough money in his budget to license the rights to use the music (or a recording of it) in his film.

I know this was an emergency but I have to say (my one complaint) that Justin is in terrible shape. He now dances worse than the worst corps dancer. Clearly choreographing is his priority and he shouldn't be dancing. He drew my eye away from the ensemble because he was so bad. Hopefully, by Sunday (when this program is repeated) Sean or someone else will have learned the whole role.

He danced absolutely fine (well, better than fine) in Serenade last weekend, though I realize that piece may not be the best barometer of his current abilities. His body certainly does not at all look out of shape. I haven't been following him long enough to judge whether there has been a decline in his technique, though.

To my eyes, Savannah Lowery looked remarkably out of shape, though she still managed okay in Agon.

Peck re his own dancing, in a recent article by Rebecca Milzoff in New York Magazine:

“I’m not a very good dancer,” he says matter-of-factly when I ask what his flaws are. “My feet don’t point far enough, my extension is embarrassing. Dance for me has been hard, because it’s a strive for perfection.”

I haven't seen Peck on stage very much recently, but he looked to be in decent enough shape in "La Valse." In any event, I'd say Peck was interesting as a dancer for reasons other than his technique.

But when asked why they didn't go even when they were interested, these were the most popular answers.

Could not find anyone to go with 21.6%

I acquired a taste for attending performances by myself when I started doing a lot of business traveling. Sitting alone at a performance beats sitting alone in your hotel room any day of the week. (It also arguably beats eating yet another dinner with the colleagues you just spent 14 hours with in some conference room somewhere.)

I could never figure out why arts organizations and venues don't make more of an effort to lure in solo business travelers who need more in their evening than room service.

Programming for children is almost an entirely different category in the arts making/presenting world -- there are a sizeable number of theaters and other organizations (growing all the time) that specialize in that work.

New York Theater Ballet has carved out its own NYC niche in this area with its Once Upon a Ballet series. I think they used to take these on the road too, but I'm not sure if they tour them anymore.

If ballet seasons and tours (of the big companies) were covered in the same manner that professional football is covered in the U.S., there would be so many voices and opinions at work, it simply wouldn't matter what one writer from the NY Times was going on about. There would be competing views, at all times. But sadly, it's not that kind of situation. Not even close.

If dance -- or any of the arts -- had the audience professional (or college) football and basketball had, there would be plenty of coverage. Note that a lot of the deepest "print" sports coverage now happens online on sites like ESPN's Grantland, which has expanded to take on bits of popular culture too. ESPN can afford to throw money at marquee content producers and long-form pieces.

Well, thank you for popping back in, Leigh! That's a mighty helpful summary, especially for those of us that don't get to see as much live Ashton as we would if this were the best of all possible worlds.

Macauley did see Lopatkina's performance because I saw him there. He sat one row in front of me.

I would have expected him to be there. I don't think her performance featured in his 1/16/15 review, that's all.

Here's the quote re SL from the "Cinderella" review: "After the stuffy self-conscious rigor of the company’s opening two performances of 'Swan Lake' at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, you feel what a breath of naturalness Mr. Ratmansky is to this company."

Can't say I disagree. If given a choice between seeing the Mariinsky in Ratmansky's "The Little Hump-Backed Horse" or in its current rendition of Sergeyev's "Swan Lake," I'd definitely opt for the former, even though the sets look so cheap it breaks my heart.

How is the NYT audience supposed to balance his castigating the first 2 performances of SL (which included Lopatkina) while Gia Kourlas lauds the 2 youngest (and in my opinion worst) leads in SL: Skorik and Parish.

Although Macauley's review was published in the January 17 print edition of the New York Times, the online version is dated January 16, 2015, which is when he would have had to submit his copy in order for it to be in print on January 17. I therefore don't think Lopatkina's performance informed his review. (ETA: She performed on January 16.) He surely would have mentioned her if he saw her perform and would likely have compared her performance with Tereshkina's.

I only saw one performance (Tereshkina's & Shklyarov's second), but there are a number of things in his review of opening night that ring true to me.

Miss Venezuela put me in mind of Ovid's Daphne! I realize that's not a laurel she's rocking, but it's a mighty fine tree nonetheless.

I think you can see all the costumes here. The countries with a Carnival tradition know how to pull out all the stops, although that doesn't explain Canada ...