Kathleen O'Connell

You are lucky that my chances of holding a winning Powerball ticket are less than zero.

And for many people, easier to get to whether you're taking public transportation or driving. NYC's public transportation system and roadways were designed to get people in and out of Manhattan from the outer boroughs and the suburbs. If you live in New Jersey -- or even in parts of Queens and Brooklyn -- getting to BAM can be a real challenge. And yes -- don't sit in the orchestra! And don't worry about sitting off-center in the rings, either -- the view is just fine. (Although you might want to avoid the pairs of seats that run along the sides of the rings.) The sight lines in BAM's opera house aren't as good as those in The Theatre Formerly Known as State -- you have to be more careful when choosing your seats there.

The set designer does put Marie and the Nutcracker Prince in a gloried high-chair, though Hmmm ...now that you mention it ... I'll never be able to look at it with a straight face again I'll add it to the list of Things I Will Fix with When I Win Lotto and Take over the Board. But the first thing to go in the NYCB Nuts would be the ghastly tutus for the Flowers. Way way back in the late 50's / early 60's one of my aunts used to make novelty spare toilet paper roll covers that consisted of a southern belle-ish doll dressed in a vast, very pink, very flounced crocheted dress. You set the unused roll on the toilet tank, stood the doll up in the tube, and covered the roll up with her dress. The first time I saw the NYCB Nutcracker I gasped in horror when the Flowers appeared: they looked just like those damned dolls. ETA: Flouncy tutus and high chair in one easy shot ...

I think I was one of the few people who was underwhelmed by the ABT / Ratmansky Nutcracker when it was first presented. Most of my issues are theatrical rather than choreographic, though I have issues there as well. (Note: I saw the ABT / Ratmansky Nutcracker in its first season, so some of the details may have changed since then.) There isn’t a lot of magic in the production’s sets: the Land of Sweets, for instance, appears to be located in a tidy but minor manor park behind some unexceptional wrought-iron gates. Ho-hum. Some of this may be due to budgetary constraints, some to the scale and stage machinery of the BAM opera house. (Some of the choreography looks like it was purpose built for a smaller stage, too.) It doesn’t help that some of the big set pieces – the battle with the Mouse King, e.g. – are a narrative muddle. And I could live without the bees in the Waltz of the Flowers. The joke wears thin really fast. What I found most disconcerting was Ratmansky’s decision to have Clara (I think she’s Clara in the ABT version) and the Nutcracker Prince almost die at the hands of the Snowflakes, only to be rescued at the last minute by Drosselmeyer and carted off to the Minor Manor Park of Sweets. Now, there is a bit of menace in the Snowflakes’ music, and Russian winters are notorious in their deadly power (just ask Napoleon) but the interpolation of a near-tragedy takes the dramatic focus off of the triumph over the Mouse King and the Nutcracker Prince’s magic transformation. AND it makes the Nutcracker Prince’s mimed retelling of the battle total nonsense theatrically: at that point, wouldn’t he be recounting his just-minutes-ago near-death experience? AND IT JUST KILLS ME (sorry for shouting) that the kids have to be rescued by some grown-up just when we should be glorying in their own agency and their independence from adult ministrations. They slew the evil villain on their own, thank you very much. My absolute favorite thing about the Balanchine version is that there are no human grown-ups in the Land of Sweets and that the Sugar Plum Fairy treats Marie and the Nutcracker Prince as if they were her peers and her honored guests, not kids deposited in her charge. A good Sugar Plum treats the Prince’s narration like it’s the most gripping battlefield report she’s ever gotten. It’s not even clear that the children ever return to the Stahlbaum’s cozy bourgeois milieu: when we last see them they are taking off in a magic sleigh for who knows what adventure and are still very much a royal pair. For related reasons I’m not enthusiastic about Ratmansky’s handing over the big pas de deux over to Clara’s vision of her grown up self dancing with a grown-up beau. It signals a return to the real, un-magical, grown-up world. It’s not an unreasonable direction to go in, of course; I just prefer it to be magic all the way down. Ratmansky’s version is very resolutely focused on real, lived human life. (The Sugar Plum Fairy is, if I recall correctly, a non-dancing role. She seems kind of like an auntie.) If you want to see a different (but not outré) take on the story, by all means go to the ABT version — there’s definitely good stuff in it. If you want to revel in traditional Nutcracker magic, the NYCB version might be a better bet. I happen to like it when there are tons of kids in the audience, especially when they are really, really into the story.

At the Friends luncheon last winter, when Parker made a presentation about this series, she said that she is trying to figure out how to get tourists who always take in a Broadway show to venture a little farther north to Lincoln Center and take a look at the NYCB. I do think that was the primary audience for the AOL series. Then shouldn't they be making a fuss over what goes on in the THEATER? The tourists don't make pilgrimages to Broadway because they've seen a few featurettes showing actors putting on their make-up or rehearsing in their street clothes. They go because they're going to see a SHOW -- the kind of show they can't easily see in their hometowns, either because there are famous stars in the cast, or because the production values outstrip what a regional theater or touring company can manage, or because the local venue doesn't have the perceived cachet of a Broadway theater. And they know what they're going to get -- the most successful Broadway shows build the "let's go see a show!" experience around some known quantity -- a famous actor, a "franchise" of some sort (Lloyd-Webber, e.g.), familiar pop songs bundled into a juke-box musical, or a storied classic. In this respect, ballets that are not Swan Lake or The Nutcracker are like off-off-Broadway. The AOL series is a worthy effort, but I'm not convinced that it sells ballet as a theater-going experience. As many others have said: show some dancing!

The right part of the stereotype is?? Well, I'd hoped it would be understood that I didn't think any part of the stereotype was "right." ETA: What I tried to convey, but perhaps didn't, is that tackling the whole "all male dancers are gay" stereotype by hauling out the counter-examples seems to me like a misguided effort to accommodate a presumed squeamishness about sexual orientation.

Ah, but how refreshing it might have been to hear a male dancer say something like "Yeah, when I was a kid I was worried that my classmates might think I was gay. But guess what: its OK to be gay! That's what I learned in ballet class." I'm mostly peeved with the production team for going after the wrong part of the stereotype.

I could have done without all the hoisting of the bro cups over the male-to-female ratio in ballet studios, though. (Episode 8: Male Dancers) And I'd like to see a same-sex couple. I realize that this is AOL ... but the demographic this series is targeting is commendably relaxed about same-sex marriage. (According to a March 2013 ABC / Washington Post poll, 81% of adults under 30 are in favor of same-sex marriage.)

Cobweb -- I totally agree about Shayer! Although I didn't know who he was at the time, I couldn't take my eyes off of him in "Clear" (except when I couldn't take them off Thomas Forster ... ) The first thing I did when I got home after Saturday evening's performance was scour the ABT website to figure out who I'd been watching. Those jumps were a thing of beauty. And he's fast, to boot.

The puppetmeister/control and struggle aspects between Prospero and Ariel/Caliban/Miranda should be catnip, though -- think of all those Drosselmeier/Marie/Prince impositions, and von Rothbart, and both Ashton and Balanchine told a complex story in "Midsummer." I'm not sure why "the Tempest" is so elusive. It also sounds like there are structural issues that repeat viewings won't "fix." As others have pointed out, the music Ratmansky chose (Sibelius' incidental music for "The Tempest") is a huge obstacle. It sounds like a film score, not dance music -- it's lovely, but inert. I think Ratmansky's first mistake was inserting the play's backstory as a flashback rather than taking things in chronological order. I can practically recite parts of "The Tempest" by heart and even I was confused by the flashback. Just because Shakespeare begins with Alonso's shipwreck doesn't mean Ratmansky has to. If he'd shown us the usurpation, then Prospero and Miranda's shipwreck, then the enslavement of Ariel and Calaban, then Alonso's shipwreck etc etc etc the ballet would have had a clearer narrative arc. Imagine "Midsummer" if Balanchine had started with Titania's infatuation with Bottom and only then flashed back to the initial quarrel with Oberon, and I think you'll get the picture. And it looks to me like Ratmansky is airlifting his tribe of faintly malevolent enchanted spirits from one ballet into another ... all with punk headgear ...

You said it. The plot of "Namouna" is easier to follow ... "The Tempest" isn't the kind of play that translates well to dance. I can see being tempted by the possibilities inherent in characters like Ariel and Calaban, but Prospero seems a choreographic bridge too far. I suspect that more than one choreographer, director, or composer identifies with Prospero and all of his theater-making (not to mention his directorial control) -- "I am SO like this guy!" -- and that he must therefore be irresistible to them.

I neglected to mention that there are computer workstations in the 3rd floor carrells -- including the viewing stations -- from which you can access the on-line catalogue. So, you don't have to look everything up before you go. If you're near Lincoln Center and you've got an hour or two to kill, you can just wander into NYPLPA and watch whatever strikes your fancy. Provided the Library is open, of course. Its hours are limited: 12PM-6PM on Tues, Wed, Fri, & Sat; 12PM-8PM on Mon & Thu; closed on Sun.

A general guide to using the NYPLPA collection of dance recordings: 1) I believe that the DVDs that can be checked out from the NYPLPA are limited to commercial releases. The items in the research collection must be viewed on site -- i.e., at NYPLPA's Lincoln Center location. To date, that that includes the streamable items that have been digitized. I don't know if the streams will eventually be made available at other NYPL branches. 2) The catalogue indicates whether the item you want to view is a film, a video, a DVD, or a streamable digitized film. For example, I did a basic search for "balanchine" and "square dance." Under "Format" I checked the boxes for "film" "video cassette" and "DVD." You can see the results here. The first item that appears is a film on video disk of Suzanne Farrell's final performance. (No, she didn't dance Square Dance at her final performance ... It just so happens that Square Dance was on the program. You can get more information on the item -- cast, performance date, wide or close shot, etc by clicking on it's entry title.) Note the green text that reads "In-library use only": If you wanted to view this item, you have to request it from the desk and watch it in the third floor viewing stations. (More on how that works below.) 3) A little further down the list is a listing for "Square Dance [Close Shot] (Film - 1993)." This item has been digitized and can be streamed on-site. If you click on the text that reads "Connect to this title online (onsite at Library for the Performing Arts only)" you will be taken to the film's web page where you will be given more information about the item and told that you can stream it on-site. 4) Some notes about the 3rd floor viewing room: a) If you want to view one of the not yet digitized, not streamable items, you have to write down its catalogue number and give it to one of the clerks at the 3rd floor AV desk. He or she will hand you a set of headphones and send you to a viewing station (basically, video monitors set up in study carrells). Your hands never touch the media! A technician in the bowels of the AV collection loads it remotely and feeds the content to your designated viewing station. You can control playback from your workstation and communicate directly with the AV tech if there is a problem with the film (e.g., no sound, no picture, etc.) I'm guessing that one of the real advantages to the digitization project is reducing the number of items that have to be viewed with the assistance of an AV tech. b) BE WARNED! You have to check the following items before you are allowed into the 3rd floor special collections and viewing area: Parcels and packages Shopping bags and oversized bags (including purses) Suitcases and large containers Strollers Briefcases, back packs, and bookbags Coats and umbrellas Laptop cases You can bring in: Personal books and other reading or writing materials Laptop computers Small purses Everything has to fit into one of the plastic bags the staff gives you. (I usually bring a clear plastic ziploc of my own just in case.) c) You have to get special permission to view some items. Usually this just means filling out a form stating your purpose for viewing the item and acknowledging that you will only be allowed to view it a limited number of times; it really depends on the restrictions the donor or rights holder has put on the material. The few times I've had to do this, I had to view the film in a special room (the Theater on Film and Tape Archive, or TOFT) -- I don't know if that applies to all special permission films or just the ones I happened to request. d) Be prepared for less than ideal viewing conditions: the carrells are a cramped, the lights are bright, there's a bit of a hubbub going on around you, playback can be a bit wonky, etc. But it's worth it!

Grrrrr ... I'll be out of town! Otherwise it would have gone right on my dance card.

Oh thank you! W-a-a-a-a-a-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-w!!! I feel good!

Ratmansky's wonderful, delirious, demented Namouna returns to the NYCB repertory this season and I am absolutely psyched to see it again. Parts of it just make me laugh out loud with sheer delight.

Thanks for the link, pherank. If I'm reading the AGMA agreement correctly, a corps member with 5-7 years of service made a minimum of about $1400 per week under the old contract. Just for some context, a fully credentialed K-12 teacher with a BA makes about $1340 per week in the SF public school system. (My calculation based on a salary of $49,500 for a184 day work year, which works out to 36.8 weeks. You can find the SF public school salary schedule here and the contract here.) There are other things that need to be taken into consideration, of course -- e.g., overtime, benefits, etc. The dancers get overtime; the teachers don't. On the other hand, the teachers may have access to better health and retirement plans (I know AGMA runs both a health and retirement plan, but I believe the ability to participate in them depends on the collective bargaining agreement negotiated with each arts organization.) But the base salaries appear to be roughly comparable. Usual caveat: I'm not arguing that artists shouldn't get paid more. It would be interesting to know what the musicians make.

Nothing prepares one for a good wallow in the mud of an acrimonious "debate" like the comments section of an opera blog. There will be peace in the Middle East before there's and end to the Callas v Tebaldi flame wars -- and we're talking about two deceased women who haven't been heard live in a theater in decades.

Sigh ... this even seems to have caught the folks who put together New York Magazine's very up-to-the-minute Approval Matrix by surprise. Check out this week's entry in the "Highbrow and Brilliant" quadrant (the upper right), which I assume is a thumbs up for NYCO's 2013-2014 season, beginning with the much hyped BAM co-production of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Anna Nicole: "St. Anne's Warehouse finally has a permanent home -- in the Tobacco Warehouse ... Meanwhile, after giving up its home, New York City Opera seems to be brilliantly homeless ..." Perhaps NYCO's sad plight will make it to the "Lowbrow and Despicable" quadrant in next week's issue. Parterre Box's La Cieca, meanwhile, has a slightly more cynical take. Go here and here. There were many things NYCO did much, much better than the Met ... its demise will be a real loss.

Hmmm … Maybe NYCB should do a porno. Other than Bugaku, I mean. Coppelia seems particularly rich with promise. Ahem, but back to one of Helene’s points: as the popular music industry demonstrates, the wide availability of inexpensive (or even free) recordings doesn’t necessarily cannibalize live events. From The Economist’s 10/07/10 issue: Many musicians treat recordings not as a money-making end in themselves, but as a way to build an audience and pull it into a venue for a live event. As “The Sky is Rising” TechDirt’s 1/30/12 report on the entertainment industry pointed out “There’s actual scarcity (not artificial scarcity) for live music … There really isn’t a way to replicate rock stars like Bono, and many fans will do (or pay) almost anything to see them.” Big acts like U2 grab the headlines in this regard, but many indy bands make a decent living playing clubs and smaller venues. I live in near Irving Plaza and Webster Hall. They’re lined up to get in every night despite the fact that you can watch just about any act on YouTube or download their recordings for nothing if you really want to. Live in cinema broadcasts of concert music and dance (yes, I’m deliberately avoiding the terms “classical” and “ballet”) might not function as the same kind of marketing tool that a music act's recordings can, however. For one thing, a broadcast of an opera, a ballet, or an orchestral concert is much more like a live event than a U2 single is like a U2 concert. (Sporting events are probably a better analogy here, although there is real money in broadcast rights.) For another, a major ballet, orchestra, or opera company with a “home” is unlikely to undertake the kind of extensive (and punishing) year-in-year-out tour schedule that a music act will. (It’s a different story for smaller dance and music ensembles. The Paul Taylor Dance Company never rests. Ditto the St. Lawrence String Quartet.) And popular music is deeply woven into the of the fabric of daily life in a way that the concert arts are not. (And I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but that's another discussion.) So I can see why a U.S. performing arts organization that is not the Metropolitan Opera might hesitate to race into the live in cinema broadcast market: the barriers to entry are high (you have to negotiate with rights holders, artists, producers, donors / grantors, and distributors for starters), it’s expensive to do well, the financial rewards are uncertain, and it won’t necessarily put butts in seats back home. For most performing arts organizations, live in cinema broadcasts are unlikely to be any more self-supporting than actual performances are and few can offer the draw of twenty-five star-studded productions over eight months like the Met does. This is where PBS ought to be awakening from its Antiques Roadshow and Yanni Pledge Week Special slumber to provide a real service to the arts. Live from Lincoln Center needn’t—and shouldn’t—be a once-in-a-blue moon TV broadcast anymore. PBS might use its institutional resources to produce a nice smorgasbord of live performances beamed into theaters and high school auditoriums across the nation year-round. (The Lincoln Center theaters are never dark, not even in August.) They could follow up with re-broadcasts on their own network, with downloads on iTunes or Amazon, with streaming on Netflix and Amazon, on the menus of airline seat-back entertainment systems, whatever wherever. A consortium of major performing arts centers might collaborate to do the same thing. Hello, hello – Michael Kaiser, are you there?

I'm grateful to him for his wonderful recording of that translation, because I never much cared for Beowulf before. There's a recording of Heaney reading Beowulf on YouTube. Part One is here. Part Two is here.

Oh, sad news! I love to read Heaney's translation of Beowulf aloud -- he mined the particular sonorities of the English language for everything that they're worth and the poem fairly leaps off the page at you. A memento mori from Heaney's Beowulf (lines 1758-68) -- grim, but gorgeous to read. [Heaney's puts this synopsis in the margin: Beowulf is exhorted to be mindful of the fragility of life] O flower of warriors ... For a brief while your strength is in bloom but it fades quickly; and soon there will follow illness or the sword to lay you low, or a sudden fire or surge of water or jabbing blade or javelin from the air or repellant age. Your piercing eye will dim and darken; and death will arrive, dear warrior, to sweep you away. RIP

What Swanilda8 said. It's an awful production: dreadful to look at and worse than dreadful at storytelling. NYCB has many, many better things to see. If you'd like to stay focussed on story ballets, I recommend Balanchine's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." NYCB won't be presenting it until June, but it's worth the wait. If you want to know what to during NYCB's upcoming fall season, just ask -- I know you will get good recommendations from the Ballet Alert community!

Possibly, but Macaulay is not the first to make the comparison nor will he be the last, I suspect. To cite only one such, a passage from Joan Brady's "The Unmaking of a Dancer": "There is a coming of age in first squeezing the feet into tiny satin shoes....even the pain they cause, which can be awful, takes on a mystical significance of its own, like the first blood drawn in battle....It took years for the fruit of such footbinding to manifest themselves, but at the time I was delighted. What a toe shoe succeeds in doing is no less radical than changing the nature and function of the foot altogether..." Note: I suspect that what follows is in the wrong thread, but since my initial complaint about Macaulay's article started here, I'll continue here. Moderators -- feel free to move this to a more appropriate thread. The comparison of pointe work to foot binding is worse than silly: it's lazy. It attempts to blow a superficial resemblance up into a damning critique. The thinking goes something like this: "Pointe work, like foot binding, involves the feet, requires special shoes, looks painful, isn't practiced by men, and began in a less-enlightened era, therefore it too is an example of the benighted oppression of women by a male-dominated hierarchy. It too is an example of men crippling women out of a warped sense of beauty and a perverted eroticism." And although Macaulay isn't actively promoting the equation, he's happy to dump it into his litany of straw men and rhetorical questions to let his readers know he's hip to the issue. But the charge the comparison levies against ballet is sufficiently inflammatory to warrant a rebuttal. And if Macaulay doesn't really accept the comparison, he shouldn't have invoked it unless he was willing to challenge it head on. [For a refresher, here's Macaulay: "The questions pile up. Does the 21st century even need ballerinas? America is one of many Western societies where women fight for equality in the workplace and can no longer expect men to stand when they enter a room; same-sex marriages are now institutionalized. Ballet had a beginning; it may have an end. In particular, the practice of dancing on point may one day seem as bizarre as the bygone Chinese practicing of binding women’s feet. Do we still need an art form whose stage worlds are almost solely heterosexual and whose principal women are shown not as workers but as divinities?"] And the resemblance is superficial: 1) Foot binding was not an option. If you were a Han Chinese woman in any but the lowest class, your feet would have been bound to ensure your marriageability. But no one is forced to dance on pointe. Yes, you have to dance on pointe to be a classical ballerina -- but forgoing a career as a classical ballerina is in no way the equivalent of being deprived of the ability to walk normally for the rest of one's life. 2) The structural damage done to the bound foot was extreme and irreparable. I urge everyone to go to this Wikipedia page for grim pictures of the results. But in the meantime, here's a description of the foot binding process itself, which was usually begun somewhere between ages 4 and 7. "To enable the size of the feet to be reduced, the toes on each foot were curled under, then pressed with great force downwards and squeezed into the sole of the foot until the toes broke. The broken toes were held tightly against the sole of the foot while the foot was then drawn down straight with the leg and the arch forcibly broken. The bandages were repeatedly wound in a figure-eight movement, starting at the inside of the foot at the instep, then carried over the toes, under the foot, and around the heel, the freshly broken toes being pressed tightly into the sole of the foot. At each pass around the foot, the binding cloth was tightened, pulling the ball of the foot and the heel together, causing the broken foot to fold at the arch, and pressing the toes underneath." Bound feet were prone to infection. Here's another paragraph from the Wikipedia article that will get your attention: "If the infection in the feet and toes entered the bones, it could cause them to soften, which could result in toes dropping off; although, this was seen as a benefit because the feet could then be bound even more tightly. Girls whose toes were more fleshy would sometimes have shards of glass or pieces of broken tiles inserted within the binding next to her feet and between her toes to cause injury and introduce infection deliberately. Disease inevitably followed infection, meaning that death from septic shock could result from foot-binding, and a surviving girl was more at risk for medical problems as she grew older." Women with bound feet were unable to walk normally -- they had to take mincing little steps while balanced on their heels. The wives, concubines, and daughters of wealthy men could rely on servants for help; the wives of poorer men had to work despite their pain and limited mobility. Dancing on pointe is undeniably hard on the feet (we've all seen this Henry Leutwyler photo) but it doesn't inflict the kind of pain or do the kind of damage that foot binding did. I'd say it's more akin to the wear and tear perpetrated on the bodies of professional athletes. And in that regard whatever damage that results from dancing on pointe is surely more benign than the chronic traumatic encephalopathy suffered by the participants in football, boxing, and ice hockey. I'm fine with the contention that pointe work was prompted by a notion of ideal womanhood that may seem ludicrous -- and disempowering -- to us now, although I'd also argue that we needn't therefore consign a whole art form to the dustbin of history. But I'm not fine with basing an argument on an invidious comparison -- and that's what the equation of pointe work and foot binding is.

And now, apparently, Gillian Murphy. From a correction posted today (7/9/13) at the bottom of Macaulay's original article: I'd have a higher opinion of the article had Macaulay made an effort to explain just what he means by "ballerina" and then shown how the women he discusses exemplify the term (or don't, as the case may be). The whole "Can there be such a thing as an American Ballerina?" riff comes off like a quickly improvised hook on which to hang the list of dancers he happens to like. And don't even get me started on bloviating like this: "as she matches music with movement, she shows how the immense scale of ballet can turn musicality into a vastly three-dimensional form." Lordy, what does that even mean? Or the straw men: "For many people, a ballerina must also be an embodiment of the Old World … To some, an American ballerina has always been a virtual contradiction in terms." Who are these people? Not ABT, as Macaulay suggests; if its management thought an American-born ballerina had the kind of star power that they believe Cojocaru and Osipova have, they'd be running after her with a contract and a pen whether she embodied the old world or not. And the stuff about pointe work as the functional equivalent of foot-binding is beyond silly. Sure, ballet often exploits the realities of human sexual dimorphism, but that doesn't mean that it must necessarily be "an art form whose stage worlds are almost solely heterosexual and whose principal women are shown not as workers but as divinities" -- and Macaulay knows it. And frankly, any definition of "ballerina" that doesn't include Wendy Whelan "full time" just makes no sense. Yeah, she's on my list. OK -- rant over.