Helene

I guess I just know so many single women, and fertility-challenged and blended families who have adopted children of all races and skin tones or had children with other spouses that this tends to go over my head now, and I forget how 15 years ago, it wouldn't have.ETA: Plus, my attention span is very short for theater, and my mind has been known to wander off at the most trivial observation or distraction...

I can think of several reasons. First, there can be a general perception that someone who did not make it wasn't talented enough and is using race/gender/height/weight/you name it as an excuse. Complaining about race, certainly in this post-affirmative-action climate, can be interpreted as sore losers. ("We let you into Harvard, why don't you shut up?")Second, ballet is a very small world. I've never worked in ballet, specifically, but I have worked in institutions, and there is a lot of institutional pressure to conform. How I behave is considered a reflection on my boss and my boss's boss. If I am unreliable, then they are unreliable, by association. If I am unpredictable, they are nervous. I could see how teachers and academies, who rely on institutions run by a close-knit group to hire their students, could be burned if a former student of theirs was a squeaky wheel. Why take a chance on this teacher's recommendation, if this could happen? Disclosure never occurs in a vacuum, which is why there are whistleblower laws, and retaliation runs deep. If ballet is to become racially diverse, then for the best chance of success, there needs to be a large pool of young children who start the discipline young. Stating publicly that there is prejudice and racism is likely to cause parents and children to say, "why bother?" Because dancers experience or feel they experience racism or any kind of unfair treatment does not mean that the love and dedication they have to the art and the loyalty they have to teachers who've encouraged them and their schools disappears automatically, nor that some hope that the future will be less onorous for the next generation.

I've never seen a ballet version of Anna Karenina, but as I (slowly) read the novel, I continuously think about what would not translate to ballet. (Levin's philosophizing and treatises on farming are one example.) Last night I was thinking about how the entire section on war in War and Peace should be a similar casualty. It sounds like the same should be done for Golden Age, although that wouldn't be authentically Soviet. Does the music for Act III lend itself to the more personal, or would it sound bombastic and out-of-place needing different edits? Seattle saw a revival of Val Caniparoli's The Bridge, also set to Shostakovich, in which five incarnations of the same historical couple give very personal takes on a war-time situation, with only a few literal reactions to the actual fighting (ducking for cover, getting shot). Thank you for the review, chiapuris. It's great to hear that Acts I and II are so rich.

I'm able to insert śpéčïàł çħåřãċțëřŝ using the Character Palate on my Mac (and the Windows thingy -- that's a technical term -- as well as alt+combinations on my PC) and they show up fine here. Perhaps your browser code page is incompatible? My browser (Firefox) is set to use Western: ISO-8859-1. On Firefox, the setting is under View/Character Encoding. On Safari, it's under View/Text Encoding and the options either of the Western options. Also "Default" works the same as the two Western options for me in Safari, but I would think that's dependent on geography. Safari works for extended ASCII characters only and will replace Eastern European and Turkish characters, for example, with ????'s.

But I forgot -- my card and bagel were taken away from me mid-bite the last time I visited and stood at the corner waiting for the traffic light to change... I look forward to reading your review.

Victims of discrimination notice it more often than other people do, but they can also, understandably, become oversensitive and sometimes imagine prejudice where none exists. This may be true of Aesha Ash, for example. She cites only one example of racism in all her years of dancing, a repetiteur who said she didn’t want any brown bodies in the Swan Lake corps... I've asked for evidence of exclusionary practices in ballet today several times. Given the wide knowledge and experience base of so many posters on this board, I think the quality and quantity of examples given in reply pretty much demonstrate that if these practices exist, they're rare. I think a critical point here is that working dancers rarely bite the hand that feeds them, for good reason. It's the rare dancer like Tsiskaridze who is willing to be interviewed and dismiss management (Ratmansky) the way he did in the recent NPR story. Their livelihood is based on keeping the very few powers in ballet happy. (One word from Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell was virtually unemployable in the US.) In general, dancer interviews make Michelle Kwan's look controversial. I would not expect to hear a wide number of stories of racism from any dancer who wanted to remain working in the profession and wasn't willing to burn all professional bridges. In my opinion, what that means is that we can't know even the extent to which dancers themselves feel that racism is the reason they were not chosen and explicit and coded racist remarks that were made to them, not that either is a rare occurance. I think that exclusion based on skin color or ethnicity alone to further an aesthetic of purity is also racist. I think that in general it takes time to adjust from "that's the way it has always looked" but that making the change is a good goal. Especially since the fallacy of "that's the way it has always looked" can be exposed by looking at historical photos that rg has so kindly posted for us. (Who are all of those short "fat" people anyway?) As we've discussed on several threads here, there has been a trade-off of steps and epaulement for different strengths, in which today's preferred body type excels, and even if today's model is preferred and considered an improvement, there was a loss to get there. I think underrepresentation is a loaded word in this case because it suggests that 1) proportionately as many minorities and whites want to be in ballet and 2) proportionately as many minorities as whites are currently talented at ballet. 1) is clearly not the case. This may change as more minorities are exposed to ballet, but for now it’s safe to say that a significantly smaller proportion of minorities has even watched a ballet on television, much less wanted to dance one. Minorities too have their cultural comfort zones. Also, a significantly smaller proportion has been able to afford to go to the ballet, or to put a child in ballet classes (and here fear of racism is probably a factor too). And because 1) is not the case, 2) almost certainly isn’t either. Because the pool of minority ballerina wannabe’s is proportionately considerably smaller among minorities than among whites, the pool of topnotch minority ballet dancers is probably considerably smaller than that of whites. Because this is so, working to meet racial quotas (by any name, including "inclusion") will in fact lower the quality of the art. If companies shoot for equal opportunity, they’ll attract more and more minority dancers and minority dancers who become choreographers, and enrich the art. But if they measure racism inversely by the number of minority dancers, as some do here, and shoot for mathematical equality, at least in the short run they’ll lower the quality of the art. 2dds gave a list of action items in this post (which has been copied to a new thread called Inclusion), most of which address how to increase the number of minority students and extend the audience. I don't see any suggestion that the standards of ballet be lowered to increase the number of minority dancers. In my opinion, what increases the chances of finding that rare dancer that transports us, is a good thing. Putting aside self-interest is the most puzzling thing I find about prejudice in general.

I don't know of any long-time choreographer who hasn't been criticized through various points of his or her career. "Balanchine's best days are behind him" was an often-expressed belief in his later years, sometimes expressed through wonder that his latest was so good. "Robbins is the future; he's so natural."I think Morris' version of Sylvia is fantastic, and only other commitments kept me from returning to San Francisco and traveling to NYC to see it again. I don't expect anyone else to, and any day now I expect to hear a knock at my door to take back my New Yorker card . But apart from the character of Eros, which was so clearly made for a young Morris, and the villagers dance at the end of Act I (which I thought was the weakest part of the whole ballet), I didn't see all that much "contemporary" Morris in vocabulary, although clearly the sensibility was 21st century, not 1950's. I thought he took ballet on its own terms.