citibob

I think it's too quick to say this issue is dead. POB is a very large organization, in a society with a significant African minority (due to France's past colonial activity in Africa). And they have not even one dancer of African descent? Doesn't that strike you as somewhat of a bias? Someone else pointed out that in America, it's common to see a few men of color in a company of all white women. That doesn't strike me as a dead issue either. Rather, it seems to stem from a greater willingness to allow for individuality among men --- and a greater trouble hiring men in general --- combined with an underlying bias against dancers of color. And then there are the stereotypes. You know, the idea that if you're black then you should be doing hip-hop or Alvin Ailey or something, and singing gospel music. Ailey was a genius. But he's not for everyone. It is still very hard for African Americans interested in traditionally "white" art forms. And that difficulty comes from both sides --- discrimination on the European end, combined with a "why are you selling out and trying to be white" on the African end. Please do not conclude this is a past issue until you've personally interviewed enough minority dancers and heard it from them. Just listing all the African-American dancers you've ever seen could be doing them a disservice.

This reminds me of E.T., which is a great movie but also falls outside the realm of high art. Consider the quote more...

Hey, I'm not in on the details either. NYCB was originally funded by a wealthy individual (Kirstein) who had a vision for ballet. We're talking about a ballet company whose advertising budget is as big as their dancer payroll ($3 million, I'm told). And now they feature product placement on stage. But question their marketing practices and "how else are they supposed to survive?" is the common response. If ABT has $3m to spend on advertising every year, then they are not exactly in the poorhouse. That's not including their additional marketing costs. This is a SIGNIFICANT fraction of their budget, and does NOTHING to improve the substance of the art itself --- other than help keep attendance up. I dance for a company that does not engage in these practices. We do not take tobacco money. We do not engage in product placement on-stage. We do not charge an arm and a leg for our SI students in order to subsidize ballet patrons' night at the theater. How do we survive, then? I'm not sure, probably the old-fashioned way --- individual and corporate donors, combined with perennial cost-cutting measures. It's a lot of work and slow process. But we continue to grow, and we don't end up in emergency measures every time there's a downturn in the economy; this is the second recession we've weathered. So I know it's possible to survive without doing all the things discussed in this thread. But I think it requires a different approach.

OK, I figured out the point I was trying to make a few posts back, but seemed to have gotten lost. There is a difference between CORPORATE PATRONAGE and PRODUCT PLACEMENT, although both of them are a form of COMMERCIALISM. Corporate Patronage: a company gives money to the ballet company. In return, the company lists the corporation's name prominently in the program. Other things may be given in return as well --- ad space in the progrm, for example. In general, corporate patronage does not affect the artistic nature of the production, other than by providing money. Product Placement: this is what I see with CK. It's an entirely different ballgame. A commercial product is actually featured in the artistic work. My point was that Phillip Morris engaged in corporate patronage, and that CK was doing product placement. Whether or not the products in question kill people is an entirely different issue. The issue here is that product placement could pose a serious threat to the artistic independence -- and therefore integrity -- of the ballet. Will ABT need to feature CK products for costumes in the future if it wishes for continued support by CK? What will this restriction do to new choreography? What other product placements are next? Product placement is commonplace in TV and movies and sports. But is this the way we want to go in ballet?

Standard university admissions might know they need an incoming class of 1000 students. They know that 50% of admitted applicants will come. So out of 10,000 applications, they admit 2,000. And then they get about 10,000 students coming in. Waiting lists can be used to further tailor the exact number of incoming students. Grad school admissions --- at least for PhD and especially at a school such as Yale --- is very different from undergrad because of the size of the program and the individuality of the applicants. A department might have, say, 5 slots for incoming PhD students in a particular year. It can't just admit 10 and hope that 5 will come --- maybe 8 will come, maybe only 3. Therefore, PhD programs try very hard to admit only those applications they think are: 1) Qualified 2) Genuinely interested in the department as a first choice Everything is MUCH more personal, and most of the negotiation therefore happens before the admission committee makes its decisions. Rules are flexible. You can even sometimes gain admission after the nominal deadline by calling up the professors involved, especially if you have external funding. Admissions for a large SI such as ABT's would function more like undergraduate admissions. This reminds me of the CPE program --- Clinical Pastoral Education. It's a lot like the SI game. Seminary students need to get hooked up with a CPE program for a summer, where they spend a summer in a hospital. New York City's CPE programs don't charge much tuition, but you're on your own for housing and they have a reputation for over-working the students, even on weekends. And that can be expensive in New York. Boston's CPE programs charged a $300 non-refundable fee to hold a spot, due in November. They clearly wanted students even less than New York. We found a rural CPE program that had reasonable tuition, offered free housing, didn't work its students on weekends, offered a reasonable schedule on applications, and was set in a beautiful area with lots of culture nearby. Hard choice, huh....

The difference between CK and Philip Morris (other than the obvious, that jeans are good clothing but cigarettes kill): Philip Morris cigarettes were never featured on-stage.

There's a big difference. The earlier era was not steeped in commercialism. Yes, individual patrons were acknowledged, and what they got out of was probably individual prestige. Every ballet company still does that today, in its donors listing. But getting Calvin Klein to sponsor a show is fundamentally different than getting the Pope to sponsor it. Calvin Klein isn't interested so much in personal prestige as in money. And the idea is that this will help SELL jeans. When we say the modern world is highly commercialized, we mean that buying and selling stuff has increased to a frenzied pace, and that the act of buying selling stuff has been linked to just about every area of modern life --- apparently now ballet as well.

We live in a society in which we like to believe we're getting something for nothing. TV is "free", and that's good, we think. We don't notice the premiums we're paying on everything from McDonald's to Coca-Cola to General Motors. Yes, every time you buy a nationally branded item, you're helping support quality (or otherwise) TV programming. Maybe we need to understand that when the corporations underwrite art, we are ultimately paying for it, while simultaneously ceding control.

This one wasn't ABT. But PNB was recently featured in Pointe Magazine in an infomercial article displaying all the latest stuff in dancewear.

Of course I meant that you give back the stuff at the end of the evening. If you want to see this mechanism in action, just try bringing food into the theater. 9 times out of 10, they'll ask you to either leave the theater, or leave the food with them.

I don't think a law is needed. Theaters already have the right to ban cell phones, and confiscate any cell phone that rings. As far as I know, this has never been challenged in court; hence, no need for anything stricter. Problem is, theaters don't want to anger their patrons, so they have to be very nice, even when people get rude with cell phones. We remind our patrons to turn off their cell phones. And if someone comes in with a camera, we confiscate it at intermission. As a dancer on-stage, I help out by providing reports of exactly where the camera is, and who has it (the people managing the house have a view of the audience from behind, and can sometimes miss things like cameras for that reason).

What is the conflict of interest to which you refer? George Balanchine was certainly the main choreographer for his company, and the results speak for themselves.

This might be the crux of an issue. Balanchine is the one who said "Ballet is Woman". And his male stars not withstanding, there seems to have been some truth in that for Balanchine. Someone in our audience told me the other day, "I was up at Sarasota watching NYCB last week, and your men do a LOT more than theirs." With that in mind, it would be no surprise that Balanchine did not attempt to develop pointework for men, whatever possibilities may or may not lie in that area. As for speedy legs, that is a matter of training. My legs are rather fast, in fact; but you have to train them for length and not bulky muscles. I have seen even faster legs on men at NYCB (Woetzel I remember in particular had VERY fast feet and legs, and the choreography displayed that). Fast twitch (vs. slow twitch) muscle fiber would probably be the biggest determining factor in how hard it is to develop speedy legs. And I've never seen any study finding any gender-based difference in the fast:slow proportion.

Choreographers have to be good at "debugging". Suppose you have five dancers doing a step in formation. And after the end of the step, they're no longer in formation. Then you must answer, what did they do differently from each other to fall out of formation in just one step? The result of this examination leads to a refinement of the technique. We work on many of the technical details we do just to stay together. Some ways of doing things technically tend to keep a group together; others tend to make it disperse.

Choreographer is an even harder job than dancer. The "major company" circuit is very hard to break into, no matter how good you are. That is in spite of the fact that people complain constantly about a lack of good choreographers. Companies often seem to prefer choreographers with a background in the culture of that company. The other way to build a career as a choreographer is to build your own company. I have seen that done with success. So far in America, that has been the only way do something significantly different from what came before (witness Balanchine). But it is a LOT of work; it is one of the hardest, most thankless jobs I have ever seen. Our choreographer Jose Mateo works 24/7/350 (literally). Ballet is his life even more than for the dancers. Ultimately, you have to build an audience and dancer base that believes in your work. That is what it takes. Yes, it is more competetive and pays worse than a dancing career. Choreography is a very different skill from dancing. Ballet is a visual art; that's something we forget as dancers. And you have to have a good sense of what your visual images are communicating to the audience. I do not know of one decent choreographer who was not a professional dancer for at least a little while. But often, they were never really stellar as dancers, nor do they have to have danced for well-known companies. I also believe a choreograph has to be a ballet master in the true sense of the word --- a master and teacher of the art. I'm sure some will disagree with me on this point. But choreographers who cannot teach their dancers will never get their dancers to do exactly what they are looking for. The best choreographers are teachers. Again, witness Balanchine.

I've concluded that one thing that makes dance so great is that you DON'T kno what's going on inside peoples' heads. I've seen pictures of myself (most of them not dancing) that are actually pretty decent pictures. Sometimes my body language seems to be saying something, or I look happy or something. I know how sour a mood I was in when that photo was taken, but whatever I was feeling inside doesn't show in the end; only the photo itself.

I usually laugh when I see that kind of projection. The critic is making a fantasy version of reality that bears only passing resemblance to what we were actually thinking, or what was actually going on in the studio. But I suppose if they want to think in terms of muses and blossoms and whatnot, then that's their right. I have a private life, and I intent to keep it private. I have rarely found what critics say to be directly useful to improving the dance. The critics really do not understand the dances in a way that would make that possible, nor do they need to. Reviews are probably most useful for marketing. In that case, it doesn't really matter what they say, as long as they're generally positive and placed prominently in the paper.

THINK. It is a redemptive design, making something of beauty out of a tragedy. Liebeskind wallows in the tragedy, making the look of fallen shards permanent.

I'm careful in evaluating an instructor's technique. Ultimately, what is important is the teacher's UNDERSTANDING of the technique and ability to CONVEY it to students. Some parts of the technique require daily practice to keep in shape. It is unreasonable to expect a 50-year-old teacher to display good technique in those areas, and it would be foolish to immediately forgoe that teacher over a 30-year-old teacher with 20 years less experience. Other parts of the technique don't require daily practice; you can do them however old and decrepit you become. If your 50-year-old teacher isn't doing them in demonstrating things, you know something's wrong. My Artistic Director hasn't taken a ballet class for a long time. But in many respects he can make his feet look better in sneakers than most of us can in ballet slippers or pointe shoes. He's maximizing the parts of technique that don't require daily practice.

The goals of a sport are generally quantitative. The goals of ballet are qualitative. That is, except when you do pirouette contests to see who can turn the most, regardless of form. Then you've made ballet into a sport.

It depends on your level of committment to the company and the level of comfort the marketing folks have with whatever you're thinking of doing.

Not to douse any dreams here, but ballet is rarely glamorous. Even if you're one of the biggest ballet stars, you're unlikely to reach true celebrity status. That means you can walk down the street and not be bothered.

I don't know what "should" has to do with it here. What power does a ballet company have over a newspaper? What could possibly happen when the powers that be take a critic out to lunch that results in that critic being replaced?

It seems that the artistic responsibilities involved grow with the size of a company. In the smallest companies, the AD might take on many director roles. In a medium-sized company, the AD can still take on artistically-related roles (teacher, choreographer, etc) but leave non-artistic jobs to other managers. In a large company, the AD must designate most artistic jobs (teacher, choreographer, ballet master) as well as most non-artistic jobs.

No, no, no. It is not extinct, nor is it going extinct. New work exhibiting the hallmarks of classiscism continues to be made; and of course, the old classics are as popular as ever.