citibob

Cavalier, Sometimes a picture can be worth a thousand words. This is one of my favorite pictures for boys and ballet, which you can use on your acquaintances if they give you any flak: Boys... If you want a printed copy of the picture, it appeared twice in Dance Spirit Magazine, February 2003.

With that said, I still don't really understand what people talk about when they talk about fundraising as the AD's job. What I've observed is like the difference between sales and marketing. The AD does "marketing", in the sense of showing up in places that will raise the profile of the company. That does not directly raise funds. The GD does the "sales" and actually gets the funds, and is much better at it than the AD could be.

I am doubtful that the men in the St. Petersburg ballet have really mastered pointe work. Go to their web site and look at the ninth picture in their gallery, the one of the guy in a pink dress. Both feet are sickled. Uugh!

It takes the same type of work and patience for male dancers to master pointe work as for female dancers. Only thing is, very few men start at the age of 13, so the bones are more fused, so that can make it harder.

Here's what I meant by "mincing". A board of directors can hire whomever it likes and call that person "Artistic Director". But if that person is truly doing little or nothing artistic, then it seems inappropriate. Similarly, if you've delegated the job of direction, then you're no longer directing the company. The board of directors also delegates the job of direction, but that doesn't make them the Artistic Directors. Thus, the question could be framed more as "is it appropriate to call someon artistic director if that person is not in the studio" instead of "should artistic directors be in the studio". The Martha Graham company recently had an extreme example of someone who was called artistic director but wasn't. The Joffrey Case is interesting to me in that Arpino, who did not have an artistic title, seems to have choreographed some of the ballets. Incidentally, I don't think that the SymphonicAlert web site is discussing this issue regarding musical directors. They are expected at the very least to make public appearences with their orchestra as they conduct most performances.

There was recently an attempt to produce "Gone With The Wind" as a ballet. But it classic American fashion, copyright and money issues laid the idea to rest.

It's really quite simple from the point of view of the dancer. Let me explain what I find to be an analogous situation. Suppose you're a graduate student, embarking on PhD studies. You're considering two different laboratories. Lab A: The head professor in charge is very famous. However, he's also so famous that he's rarely in the lab. He's always out consulting, giving keynote speeches at conferences, telling people about all his great ideas, and in general courting new funding sources. But that's OK; he has a big hierarchy of postdocs and senior grad students who can supervise the new grad students and get them going on the professor's projects. This is a great professor, and you will have the privilege of working on his projects; everyone will want to hire you after that. All papers from his lab bear his name, even if they were written by his students and he just glanced at them at the end. His lab is very well funded, in part because his activites away from the university help bring in those funds. If you study in Lab A, you will never go hungry. Moreover, you get a lot of nice perks. Nice furniture in the lab, free lunch, all the greatest new wireless toys to play with, luxury accomodations when you go to conferences. Lab B: The head professor in charge only has a few grad students and takes an active role in every bit of research that bears his name. He is available for frequent consultation with his students on their research projects. He is away sometimes and certainly bears the responsibility of getting new research funded. But he still manages to spend the bulk of his time in the lab. Maybe he doesn't fundraise enough; at the end of the day, he's more interested in doing research than in finding money. His funding is sometimes spotty; that is why he cannot support very many grad students. Today, he can only promise you funding for the first year. Travel funds are limited, but he can probably squeeze you into a few conferences per year. But at least you know if you work with this professor, you will receive real mentorship. He does not seek to make his students into clones of himself, but rather to produce true independent researchers who can direct their own research and eventually find their own funding. I have worked in Lab A and also in Lab B. I realize there are many graduate students who find the Lab A situation attractive. Unfortunately. Actually, the practices in Lab A cheapen the graduate experience. They smack of mediocrity and a desire for power, rather than a true interest in quality research. The professor in Lab A told me how great my career would be if I continued to study with him because he was such a famous guy. I didn't need him; I figured I was pretty smart as well. I ran the other way and never regretted it. He has treated my independence as true disloyalty, refusing to ever talk to me again. I still don't regret it. I don't need this guy. After all, you can't expect quality results from a mediocre process.

To call someone an ARTISTIC director, even if that person does little or nothing artistic for the company, is to mince terms. Apparently, Joffrey did manage to direct the company artistically, even though he was not in the studio very much.

What does it mean to lead the way if you're not doing anything specific? I remember one such job like this: Master at a residential college (dormitory) at Yale University. The job of Master is merely to "lead the way" and contains no specifics. But the Master is also a professor and retains all the specific responsibilities of a professor. I'd vote for the Balanchine approach. Who can argue with such success? But do try to keep the AD out of business matters. So much of "leading the way" actually means fundraising. That's best done by business and marketing staff.

[comment deleted by A.T.] Meg Flaherty-Griffith for the Spring and Fall 2002 seasons. The ballets that were choreographed on her are the most memorable and intruiging to me. She is also able to learn large quantities of new choreography at the last minute, just as the rest of us are all afraid there is too much music left to get it all done in time for opening night.

Is this an example of a larger trend, of ballet companies "upsizing"? Anybody know, what size were various 19th century ballet companies in the 19th century --- POB, Imperial Ballet (Russia), Danish Ballet, etc?

I find the concept of "style" to be problematic. If you try to truly define a "style" and self-consciously create in that "style", you risk becoming boring. After all, if you've made the same work once, why do it a second time? Do something different! And yet, we can all recognize distinctive styles in choreography and music, even within disparate works of one composer who was certainly not boring (eg: Mozart). And then sometimes, people self-consciously set out to define a new style for every piece, to make sure different pieces are not too similar. This happened in 20th Century music, in which an entire new music theory would be created for the composition of just one piece. The result was that the pieces became incomprehensible because the audience had no background in the theory (contrast to the theory of tonal music, which is used so extensively that we intuitively understand a piece of music written with that theory). So what does it mean to do all your choreography in one style? Does it mean you were self-consciously making it all the same? Or does it mean something else?

There seems to be a general principle here: preparing for something specific takes resources. The more variety you want, the more resources you need. I can relate to the issue of having little training in mime or other kinds of acting. We don't do it in our repertory seasons, then we're suddenly expected to do it for The Nutcracker. I really don't know how convincing I look. To a certain extent, that's what Forsythe did. Victoria, what are the pros and cons of the new larger size of ABT?

I'm not so sure of this. From the minute she walked into SAB, Allegra Kent was identified as an amazing talent; and she was dancing for Mr. Balanchine only four years later. But she still went through a time as apprentice, then corps, then principle (she skipped soloist). That gave her ample time to learn the repertoire from different angles.

Alexandra... Thank you. I think you've brought some good perspective to the issue. I've kind of come to conclude that in the realm of rational human resource management, formalized rankings just come with the territory of large organizations. No, I cannot imagine how I would manage 80-100 dancers (or engineers) without some time of formalized ranking system. But the issue of "hierarchies" brings up a host of other issues, which are more interesting, and which you've touched upon: how the company markets itself, how the choreographer views his or her work in relation to the dancers, the dancer vs. choreographer issue, etc. I don't think it's so unusual that Balanchine would sometimes cast corps members in a principle role. In my experience I've found that so much is possible as a dancer, but much less is possible in a given timeframe. And to work at a certain level in a company, you must be able to complete the given work in the time available. A principle dancer must be able to consistently get together principle roles, often many for each season. A corps dancer with principle potential would have to work a lot longer to get each principle role, and might have time only for one such role in a season. So it makese sense that Balanchine would cast such a dancer in one principle role, to give her experience at it. And as long as it's just one role and she has enough time to get it right, it wouldn't adversely affect the quality of the production. I found this principle in operation as an apprentice. I would be cast in just one out of four ballets. It almost didn't matter which one ballet; I had the ability to do corps parts in any one of the four, but was not yet efficent enough to do all four in one season. Towards the end of my time as apprentice, I did a soloist role (plus corps parts, one of them really light, in 3 other ballets). I did only corps work in my first season in the company; I was so busy with it, I had no times for solos.

The traditional job of ballet master is split between the choreographer/artistic director and the dancers. I've found it works pretty well for the women. But enough men have big enough egos that we can't get much done as a group without someone telling us what to do. It's frustrating to never be together, to watch the women always being together, and to be powerless to change it. So much of the choreography we do is new choreography, putting a ballet master inbetween the choreographer and dancers would slow down the whole process.

Alexandra... I'm somewhat disappointed in that answer. I was assumping, of course, that only dancers who fulfill the requirements will ever be cast in the lead roles (to do otherwise would be stupid). Given that assumption, I was expecting answer more along the lines of "because all that corps work during the week will tire out the dancer for Saturday night" or "because all that corps work will put you in the wrong frame of mind to do your best on Saturday" or "because then there won't be enough people to dance Aurora on the other nights". Is the unstated assumption here that choreographers that do not rely on rankings produce work to the "lowest common denominator" that does not highlight the achievements of its best dancers? In that case, the issue of ranking is most fundamentally one about whether choreographers fit their choreography to the abilities at hand, not so much one of human resources management. There may be another issue here. Based on many factors, a company gets dancers of different abilities and experiences. The law of large numbers implies that a large company will better be able to predict HOW MANY people posess particular skill levels, allowing the choreographers to make dance to those specifications (eg: 20 corps members, 5 soloists, 2 principles, etc). In a small company, you could find yourself (proportionally speaking) flooded with principle dancers one year and almost completely lacking the next. This reminds me of a story I heard about Sun Microsystems, where they have six levels of Engineer (labelled from "Enginner 1" to "Engineer 6"). I heard you have to graduate through all six levels before you can enter management. We were having a little chuckle at my office because we don't even have six engineers to rank! I think this is just how large corporate entites deal with human resources.

Why? I think this might get to the heart of the issue.

As for hierarchy inside vs. outside the dancers: I've found that if you eliminate it outside the dancers (i.e. eliminated ballet masters and rehearsal directors), then you actually create more, on a temporary basis, within the ranks of dancers. That is because without rehearsal directors, it is up to the dancers to teach other dancers the steps and at times, to run rehearsals. These jobs go to the dancers who know the particular choreography the best. They may not be the best dancers in the company, but they're the ones that have been at the company long enough to know the choreography at hand. I have found myself in the position of teaching dances that I know to other dancers, and then not being cast in those dances.

I don't know why this is an issue either, but it keeps getting mentioned in passing. It seems that in talking about dancers, "rankings" is a more descriptive term than "hierarchies". Hierarchy implies a chain of command; AD to choreographer to rehearsal director to dancer, for example. To the best of my knowledge, there is no chain of command between dancers even in ballet companies with a lot of ranking; principle dancers are not particularly responsible for telling corps members what to do (unless it directly affects the work of the principle dancer). On the other hand, the "hierarchical pyramid of ballet company structures" might be talking about actual hierarchies. For example, a movement to remove some of the "middle management" such as rehearsal directors and to move their responsibilities to the dancers or the choreographer. If you look at American corporate structure over the past 20 years, you see a lessening of hierarchy as corporations found they could save money by laying off middle management. However, I don't think this has necessarily translated to a lessening of ranking. Corporations (and ballet companies, I expect) still pay their employees based on value to the company. I'm not at all convinced that removing a formal hierarchy or ranking is equivalent to a culture of "all for one, one for all, nobody's important here." As long as management doesn't do something stupid such as underpaying or underusing their best dancers (risking losing them) or casting entry-level dancers in the lead roles (risking a dismal production and loss of the best dancers), I don't see what difference it makes. Everyone knows it's not "nobody's important here" because the same people keep getting the lead roles. What is the need that you see for formal rankings for some companies? How would their art be changed if they abandoned this structure?

On this board recently, I've heard much grumbling about hierarchical structures, how the modernists are trying to destroy them, and how their demise will bring the end of classical ballet. With such dire consequences at stake, I think it would be appropriate to define exactly what we are talking about when we mention "hierarchical structures".

In my training, technique and personality are one and the same thing. When learning how to turn out or stand on your legs, we analyze the situation and put our body parts in the right place. Same with "stage presence", "expression", "personality" and all those other things. We figure out where we want to put our body parts and how we want to move them (even small parts, such as eyeballs), and we do it. For that reason, my "stage personality" is rather different from my "real personality". My wife noted this in our Nutcracker party scene. The way I behaved there was COMPLETELY different from the way I behave at a real party (and less conspicuous).

Wow! You go away for a few hours and look what happens to the thread! I was not discussing baseball to berate it. Rather, as Alexandra mentioned, to point out that just because I'm not into it doesn't give me license to write taunting articles about it. Tutu14: I figure skated as a child, as did my little brother. He also played hockey, eventually. He was BY FAR the best skater on the hockey team, and could out-manouever just about any opponent. No surprise, huh? I wouldn't worry too much about hockey dads; they have a reputation for being more belligerant than parents of just about any other sport (and ballet as well). The New York Times magazine recently ran an article about male-on-male sexual harassment. The kind of "horsing around" on the job can sometimes take a turn for the worse and become harassing. Remember that men's ballet costumes --- blouse-like shirts, tights, etc --- are adaptations of what was at one time upper curst men's wear. Over the past few hundred years, we have consistently seen men's fashions appropriated by women, and then become women-only fashions. I think bell bottoms are the most recent version of this phenomenon. I think Vagansmom hit the nail on the head: ballet is an acquired taste, it takes work to learn and appreciate. That is true of all fine arts. Alexandra... some of those millions spent on dance education are spent on boy's scholarships. I think many serious schools really are trying hard to get boys and men interested. But really, what can they do (this is an invitation for an Alexandra brainstorm) Kfw... You seem to have made some tenuous assumptions that, while common, must be examined. Is men attending to one's line really "effeminate" (as a form of recognizing that you really are the art)? And if it really is "effeminite", how on earth do you make the leap to homosexuality? That is in light of the fact that effeminism and homosexuality in men are two separate things. There are macho homosexuals (but they don't stand out because they're just as macho as the next guy), and there are effeminite heterosexuals (but everyone assumes they're gay). In our society, just doing something zany (such as wearing a reindeer hat with blinking lights on it) can be seen as effeminite. Really, now... Actually, we do see men in tights on the street, usually jogging in cold weather. We also see men wearing even less. In the summer you see men wearing just shorts (bare legs is less than tights). And then there's the speedo thing... many sports involve men in revealing outfits. Body building is the ultimate in this area and, like ballet, it shares an element of the body as art.

I tried the search "Rita Ferreira ballet" on Google, and came up with someone named Rita Ferreira who posted on a portugese chat site. It had an e-mail address. Maybe that's the Rita you're looking for.

Hmm... I could easily write just such an article about me and baseball. Sorry guys, I just don't see what the big point is about the National Sport. Nor do I have the patience to sit around for 3 hours eating cotton canding and getting a sunburn while people I can barely see throw a miniscule ball around the field. I'm absolutely serious here. I've been to a couple baseball games, and I've never been so bored in my life. I don't write articles like that because they're rather annoying. As for the tights... he didn't mention that women's costumes, as well as many women's fashions, also leave little to the imagination. I think it's ultimately a power issue that conflicts with a central tenant of ballet. Ballet is one of the few art forms in which you not only CREATE the art, but you ARE the art. I tell myself that every performance; "I AM the art." Also, ballet requires an openness of the body. Simply the act of turning out and facing the audience makes one vulnerable. It is body language. In fact, it's the opposite body language of, say, martial arts. In martial arts, you present the smallest profile possible to your opponent; in ballet, the largest profile possible to the audience. Women in America are conditioned to the idea that they are art, that they are to be open to someone else coming in. Men are contitioned to the idea that they are to conquer art. You can't conquer something of beauty if you ARE that something of beauty; consequently, it is seen as "less than manly" to engage in something in which you are open to others, and in which you are the art. To say in America that men can be a work of art is somewhat taboo. There is a widely held belief that a man to do something "feminine" diminishes the person (whatever the definition of "feminine" is for the moment). The same standard of intolerance is not held towards women. This fact has been batted around by many people for a long time. The ONLY conclusion I've seen on it that makes any sense is that if one really believes this, then one believes that men are better than women. It is therefore an incredibly anti-feminist viewpoint. I see these same kinds of views not only in ballet-hating columnists and football players, but also in male ballet dancers. The result is that the men don't engage themselves in the kind of training necessary to make a beautiful line, instead over-focusing on big jumps and big turns (at the risk of increased injury). To these men, wearing tights is OK (on stage at least), but clean lines makes one "effeminite" (and hence less of a human). It's all so stupid and arbitrary, really no different from the attitude you get so often from football players. It hurts the artform in the end.