Helene

The corps member is not the head of a company who is making the decision to not renew a contract, but who could make a sacrifice to save someone else's livelihood. There's not logic that makes these equivalent. An example of something somewhat equivalent would be a corps member -- or soloist or principal -- with a trust fund or a wealthy spouse who volunteers to leave the company so that his or her salary could be used to save someone else's job. But as Apollinaire Scherr pointed out in her blog, a dancer's life is short, and his/her earning years are limited, and a dancer making such a sacrifice is not the same as one made by a company head who has made a substantial salary for a number of years.

I don't think that it's fair to factor in Kistler's salary here. It's irrelevant. I also think that if he's making 300K heading the SAB that needs to be looked at separately. I think it's perfectly fair to look at the amount of money in a household when determining how much of a sacrifice to make to sustain a company in hard economic times, when other people's livelihoods are on the line, since one argument is that people have to support families on their salaries. Martins has made his: 10% of his NYCB salary; his salary is substantial by just about any standard. It's also important in figuring out the tax bracket of a given household, which was one of my arguments. When a company states that the reason it is laying of dancers is financial, the head of that company makes 700K -- substantially more than anyone else in a similar position in dance -- and that it decided to reduce headcount instead of more substantial pay cuts on the side of upper management or to negotiate a reduction of benefits, then it is perfectly reasonable to criticize this decision and conclude that the company was in the wrong, and that has nothing to do with "broken dreams" or attractive young people. If the company was hiding an employment agenda behind these layoffs -- got to get rid of all those gossipy corps members -- when, by contract, they could have dropped any one of these corps members all along by simply telling them "You no longer meet my needs" and the union could not have made a peep, that, in my opinion, is cowardice.

At that ratio, it would make the salary of a senior corps member at ABT between 25-30K/year. The ABT contract is not up on the AGMA site. Apollinaire Scherr wrote the following on her blog "Foot in Mouth":

I would say, no, that is not the question in a time of financial crisis, especially when the amount is substantial. You had written earlier that Martins salary does not make him rich in NYC. Adding in the 300K he makes for heading SAB, even if, because of his high tax bracket and the Alternative Minimum Tax, the household is paying 50% in Federal, state, and city taxes on his salary, just on his salary alone, his take-home pay on 1 million would be over 40K/month, and that's not including Kistler's salary, which isn't public, or royalties, any investments which are taxed at a lower rate and other income sources, if any. (I don't know if she receives a salary for teaching; in a recent interview she said she was pretty much teaching full-time.) While that doesn't make one rich in NYC, and many mid-level people on Wall Street have made the same while helping to do substantial damage to the US economy, which Martins has not done, it makes them wealthy and more well off than 99% of the people who live in NYC. In addition, he's had a number of years of very high salary with the opportunity to accumulate substantial wealth during good times, while a corps member has had the opportunity to live comfortably, assuming no family to support without a second earner in the family. Balanchine took no money when there was no money to be had. If ABT dancers make so much less, and are also subject to the same high costs of living, it doesn't hold that the financial strain of an overall pay or benefits cut by the best-paid dancers in the country will sink them. ABT managed to keep their roster by forgoing vacation pay (partially offset to the dancers by unemployment benefits, with possible cost to the company if their unemployment taxes go up as a result) and contributions to pension. Since Martins said the move would save 1.2M, or about 109K/dancer, the cost of benefits must be substantial: according to a recent NYT article, Flack, as a senior corps member, was making 70-80K/year. Even if her salary was average, this would mean 40-50K/year in benefits, payroll taxes, and pointe shoes (for the women); it is likely that her salary was on the high side, and the amount for average cost is even higher per dancer. While some costs are fixed or rising (payroll taxes, pointe shoes), there was additional room to negotiate on benefits in addition to the possibility of a pay cut to save jobs. (Pointe shoes for apprentices are a 1:1 wash, anyway.) In the original article from February, Martins said "There were no plans to reduce the number of principals and soloists, and their salaries remain fixed by collective bargaining agreements". So were the benefits that ABT dancers agreed to give up. Hence the need to refute the argument that the reasons could be entirely an issue of the talent and work ethic of the 11 dancers.

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That in itself is arguable, since his salary is so much more than that earned by artistic directors with comparable responsibilities, regardless of how well or badly he does the job, and that is before his hundreds of thousands to run SAB, also considerably higher than those who run similar academies worldwide. He does not work in the private sector. A few other scenarios that do not follow this conclusion are: people who are laid off/not renewed because they become unaffordable rather than not valuable; people who are laid off because they are not useful to specific people in management; people who are laid off because they or their dependents develop medical conditions that affect the company's health insurance rates; people who are laid off because they are not sheep. This isn't the first time that Martins has cleaned house by not renewing a chunk of the corps; it happens to coincide with one of the many financial crises that the company has had since its creation. NYCB made a deliberate decision to clean house again rather than saving money elsewhere to save jobs, as a number of other companies have.

If someone had a job lead and were interested in passing it on, they would not post it on a blog, or they'd get hundreds, if not thousands, of replies. They'd try to find a way to contact the dancer(s), most likely by sending an email to the author of a news article, since the NYT already published one of those. The cost of "advice", in this case, is reading a suggestion to become a prostitute. How charming.

I don't know! I know I first became interested in ballet as a very young child after seeing it on the Ed Sullivan Show or Firestone Theater or Bell Telephone Hour, but my family wasn't interested in going to the ballet, since they already indulged me with Ice Capades and Ice Follies, where I dozed my way through chorus lines of fruit and cartoon creatures aimed at my demographic, waiting for the "real" skating to happen. I do remember seeing a performance of "Pillar of Fire" on PBS as a kid, and I was knocked over. I thought the Hagar was the most remarkable woman I had ever seen on TV -- Sallie Wilson? Cynthia Gregory? -- but if I knew her name then, I forgot it quickly, since I never thought I'd ever get to see ballet live.

I think it was a horrific idea for The New York Times to ask readers for unsolicited advice for these dancers.

I was at a performance of "Much Ado About Nothing" by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, and a woman, who was trying to tell the usher she'd rather sit in an empty seat close by, was pushed down the aisle towards the front -- her actual seat was in the middle of that row -- while the actor playing Benedict interrupted the show to seat her, in character. She was mortified.

In her article for the Summer 2009 Ballet Review on Todd Bolender and Kansas City Ballet, she notes that for the closing performance of his first season, guests Patricia McBride and Alexander Godunov danced pas de deux from "Giselle" and "Le Corsaire" and Balanchine's "Pas de Dix".

In the new Ballet Review Martha Ullman West has written an article "Todd Bolender: Kansas City, The Early Years", and the photo on the opposite page shows Bolender, in a suit, coaching two dancers in costume: Louise Nadeau and Deena Budd.

Since so few dancers reach 30 years, it's hard to imagine that 30 years is the magic number, or there would be incentive for more dancers to try and the possibility of lawsuits if dancers were "encouraged" not to meet that.

In a different thread, leonid posted an article on Valeri Gergiev from The New York Times. This is a job description that I think should earn this kind of money: 2,000 people -- that's huge. From the same article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/magazine...ml?pagewanted=1

A friend rented a condo on the beach in West Seattle, and not having a TV at home, I immediately turned on his TV and channel surfed. Luckily, the "Four Seasons" section from what I think was the 1957 TV version of the Ashton "Cinderella" was being played on the Classic Arts Showcase. As I was watching the seasons dance, what struck me most was how strong their center was, no limbs reaching only out into space. I think Ashton is doomed without dancers with that kind of center from which the limbs move naturally.

While I mostly agree with you, richard53dog, I think he may have saved the Kirov/Mariinsky after the fall of the Soviet Union with his energy and willingness to raise private money when the bottom dropped out of state subsidies, and I also heard an excellent "Tristan und Isolde" from him in Paris. I didn't get to see the "Ring" the company brought to NYC a couple of summers ago; I got sick on a plane returning from India the day before it started and couldn't risk coughing through it.

The article says that Martins "took a 1 percent cut from the previous year’s $706,000", and I think this is misleading. Based on this statement, he have taken a larger % cut in pay, but increased his royalties from other companies, or he could have had a salary increase and a serious drop in royalties, or any combination of the two. The article also states that "Damian Woetzel, the senior male principal dancer, was paid $278,000, up 24 percent. It was his 23rd and final season with the company; Daniels said the sum includes exit pay, which long- time dancers receive." "Long-time" isn't defined, but might explain why the long-time corps member is pretty much a thing of the past.

Based on the bing translator (Microsoft's newest search engine), he decided to move back to Canada and NBoC to spend more time with his family, but as his last performance drew closer, he realized he wanted to stay in Stuttgart. bing translates his quote as "I have understood increasingly in recent months, there is simply no perfect solution, I must accept a certain amount of dividedness as part of my dancer career", says Jason Reilly." The article is using the metaphor "Home is where the heart is" to describe the shift from Toronto to Stuttgart. http://www.microsofttranslator.com/BV.aspx...-ausschlag.html It takes 15-20 seconds for the translation to resolve to English. The "percent completed" is shown in red in the left hand corner.

My main problem with the radio ads on stations like WQXR and KING is that they use horrific, loud music that is jarring compared to any of the classical music they play (which is, generally, less than risky). It's rarely rock, but it's often muzaky or pseudo-jazz, like most commercials it's louder, and it makes me switch the station off immediately, maybe or maybe not to return. I used to listen to WQXR over the Internet, and they used to pick a piece to play during the commercials over the radio waves. I was amused though when my dad, who used to tape "The Vocal Scene" onto cassette when he was home, forgot to turn off the recorder for the few minutes of commercials in the middle of one program, and there was an ad for Swiss Air business class that was a throwback to the 70's.

The account takes less than a minute to set up/click the verification link from a confirmation email. I'm listening to the start of "Don Giovanni" now, waiting for the Lang Lang concert to start in 10. Thank you so much again, volcanohunter! At this rate, I don't think I'm every going to buy a CD again. There's too much live music on the Internet, and not enough time to listen to it all.

I thought most of them were playing dress-up in "Titanic", but I didn't go in expecting BBC.

Thank you so much! I was able to watch through "Dalla sua pace" before I had to head out. It was such a treat to hear Schade sing it.

This is one of the scenes that rings to the back of the theater. I don't think anyone will be disappointed (And Boal confirmed that Korbes is one of the Juliets this year, after having to pull out of the first run with an injury.)

Oh, I'm laughing and laughing! And crying at the same time...

I used to donate $25/year to the school, which allowed me to watch one class a year. The first time, I watched Stanley Williams' advanced boys class, and there were several NYCB men there -- I remember Christopher Fleming -- and so was Darci Kistler, who was coming back from an injury. A lot of NYCB men have said in interviews that they returned to Stanley Williams' class; Gold notes that he once took Company class and Williams' class.