Helene

And kfw's posts have been about Copeland's statements, endorsements, photographs, and press coverage, which have been highly publicized. No one here needs to have seen Copeland's dancing to talk about her projects, her statements, or her press coverage that are all on the public record.

He did express an opinion by selectively concluding from Macaulay's very positive review of "Romeo and Juliet" (linked in Cooper's article) that "she has work to do," which I don't read in that review. His "generally good reviews" link is to Wendy Perron, when it could have been more appropriately linked to the NYT critic's article he uses as a contrary example. When he discusses "fouette-gate," he says that critics "forgave but noted" it, when, in the linked review, Macaulay actually wrote, "The only obvious technical feature in which Ms. Copeland can improve is the notorious — and overrated — fouetté turns. She did the first half of the usual quota, though wandering across the stage; then she did a series of quick single turns — a smart alternative since they had more musical dynamics than most accounts of the fouettés." Macaulay did not "forgive" Copeland's flawed fouette turns: he made it clear he has an issue with the fouette turns themselves as "overrated", and after pointing out the deficiency in her technique concluded that the pirouettes were "smart alternative since they had more musical dynamics than most accounts of the fouettés." There was nothing to "forgive," if he didn't believe there was a sin in the first place, and I have no reason to believe that he would have said anything different had the dancer been another.

The last 990 filed on charitynavigator.org is from 2013. The dancers reported in the last five years of 990 filings are: 2013: Herrera, Kent 2012: Cornejo, Kent 2011: Herrera, Kent, Murphy 2010: Kent, Herrera, Murphy 2009: Murphy Maybe not. I did the math on this, and 12% of Principal roles in the full-lengths and 11% of the Principal roles overall were cast originally with guests. Some of them didn't perform and the roles were take by in-house dancers. I thought this would be the equivalent of two, or at max, three additional dancers. Even entry-level Principal Dancers make a reasonable amount, and the company has to pay benefits for them. Guest stars are paid by the performance. The company does not have to pay payroll taxes, unemployment taxes, benefits, contribute to pensions. I'm not sure about workman's compensation or if the company pays for other expenses, like travel, short medical insurance policies, or if these are strictly the responsibility of the guest. Of course, the company can decide not to re-engage guests, who have no protection if they become injured (unless they have a disability policy of some kind), while if they have a contract with a dancer, and the dancer doesn't work out, they still have a contract. Excellent! Of course she will: the woman never, ever sleeps!

Whereas Marina Harss writing for "The Guardian" chose to take a different approach:

The stats say that at one time, there were 338 people online at the same time, but that could have been when BT4D was part of BA! On the other hand, the other 213 people might be in a dead faint. Thank you for this. The original seasons were quite the line-up: Spring: Nadia Nerina, Summer: Violetta Elvin, Autumn: Pauline Clayden, and Winter: Beryl Grey. We've been discussing the new print of "The Red Shoes" elsewhere on the site, so I'll mention that Moira Shearer was the original Cinderella, with Michael Somes as her Prince, and Alexander Grant Robert Helpmann (see below) was the meanie Stepsister. (I wonder what Massine would have been like as the Ashton stepsister.)

Abrera Copeland Brandt Forster Scott Trenary Congratulations to them all! (So many promotions, I had to raise the maximum number of emoticons in one message )

One thing I do hope, -- because human nature* is what it is, I think it's too much to hope that there will be a day when ballet is racially diverse and race not a consideration, but people remember the history -- that some day when ballet is racially diverse and race is not a consideration, that the dancers of the time who think, "What was the big deal with Misty Copeland?" and might think find these threads on the wayback machine and appreciate what she was up against. *which, if we continue to need PhD's, means no end of thesis topics.

Maybe that's why when he had a chance, he cast Seo prominently this season. Copeland could also be cast prominently because Ratmansky casts her in his ballet(s), outside stagers cast her in their ballets, and because she's appropriate for a role and may even have learned it in the past without performing it.

And I was so hoping she'd be Captain of the Starship Enterprise. Congratulations to her

abatt's words were "might not have attended," which means an audience segment that prefers to see non-white dancers that has come to fruition, not a potential audience, and wrote that McKenzie might cast Copeland more frequently to attract them.

As you've said. Clearly not everyone here agrees. One of the characteristics of a discussion board.

I don't know on what this is based, but this is a simplification in itself. McKenzie is interested in people who buy tickets to see Copeland dance, and while there is a visible increase in the number of black audience members at her performances, the tickets sales aren't attributed to a single motivator that the audience had a preference to see non-white bodies on stage. It's a simplification for the audiences who are visibly black, and it's a simplification for the audiences that aren't visibly identifiable. Dancers prominently in the media have always attracted new audiences, and people who want to know what the fuss is will come to find out for themselves. Younger people who have grown up in new media are more attracted to a performer who has a big media/social media presence and endorsements that speak to them, ie Under Armour vs. Rolex. I would think that Copeland's new audiences are just as likely or just as unlikely to return for the rest of ABT as any other audience that isn't comprised of the "ballet family." Maybe some will be bitten by the ballet bug. Maybe some will decide that this ballet stuff is a live art form and not some ossified stereotype they had in mind. Maybe they will see another dancer who catches their fancy. Some will come back to ABT after years of not attending. The good news is that there are so many more of Copeland's new audience that if the standard percentage holds, that means more people who will stay, especially now that Copeland has been promoted to Principal, and she should expect more roles and more performances at her new rank. If she gets more roles in the Fall season mixed rep, that would be a win-win for ABT, since Fall ticket sales aren't as strong and in a mixed bill, there are more dancers in featured roles at each performance to grab people's attention as well as expose a greater range of ballet than people see in a given full-length. I believe it more likely that some black girls will see someone like them on stage and think there might be a chance for them, and that some black parents in the audience will be more like to encourage, or at least not actively discourage, their daughters from pursuing ballet, like the Ford Foundation grant convinced Merrill Ashley's parents that ballet was a legitimate path for their daughter. I also believe that the group of young ballet fans, like in the photo accompanying today's NYT article about Copeland's promotion -- everyone else was given perfunctory mention -- will expect to see more diversity in their classes and not find it that unusual to see black students and dancers at their level next to them at the barre. However, I've always believed that audience and talent development is more than what can be tallied by immediate indicators. As someone who saw the support the Korean American community gave to Yu Na Kim in her competitions, ethnicity and race can be a primary driver, and there may be plenty of fans who are there only because Hee Seo is Korean. (Obviously they are not driving ticket sales like Copeland.) However, it has been rare for that claim to be made here, while this has been a regular point of discussion around Copeland, and Seo's lack of technique or other performance deficiencies have not been attributed to her character or race. And it is certainly true of a very visible segment of the audience who show up only for the "-Ovas." As Robert Gottlieb wrote in his recent review on Eifman Ballet's visit to NYC, "He was admired in New York, too, until the savagery of most of the critics (myself included) brought the audience to its senses, except for the loyal Russian-American crowd that throngs the sidewalk outside the City Center whenever he appears. (Sociologists, take note: they were smoking less this year than in the past, when West Fifty-Fifth Street was a pulmonary disaster zone.)" According to the stereotype, the ones who speak Russian loudly in the lobbies, reek like ashtrays, answer their cell-phones mid-performance, scream like crazy for their favorites, and sit on their hands for all non-Russian dancers. In other words, the ones who are visibly identifiable and who don't represent their entire "segment."

A sigh of relief, and over the moon about Lendorf.

Thanks -- it's an important link.

I think many people at the time didn't believe that the dancers Tharp brought with her were "really" ABT, but instead were a troop-within-a-troop that was a deal to get Tharp. Copeland's Wikipedia article isn't the only thing that needs updating... My point is that after 10 minutes of searching, this neither showed up nor is it, the most comprehensive article to date, specific enough to answer any of those questions. Nor was it a feature article written at the time to note that ABT had its first black soloist, something newsworthy, entirely appropriate, and hardly patronizing.

True, but not that many say "one of the first ... – if not the first."

I wouldn't expect to find the info in a review, but it would certainly appear in a feature. Did no one with online archives think the first black female to make soloist at ABT was a notable event? Nora Kimball's Wikipedia article is woeful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nora_Kimball They're not sure. Anna Benna Sims' is skeletal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Benna_Sims It does say she "was the first African-American danceuse at American Ballet Theatre." from a 1981 "Jet" article. BlackPast.org's article on Copeland says, http://www.blackpast.org/aah/copeland-misty-1982 The only references I can find on the site are in the Misty Copeland article. I can't find anything that says when they left ABT. Kimball's Wikipedia article says she was in Frankfurt by 1991; there is a source review for her with ABT from 1987. A promising source about black US dancers abroad has a dead link. I never knew she danced in John Adams' "El Nino." I'm not sure if Sims and Kimball overlapped at ABT: she was dancing with Les Grandes Ballet Canadiens in 1972, so she'd be older. In the "Jet" article she speaks about racism she encountered.

The first. I have no reason to believe she was lying. I don't think the arguments listing all the reasons that she had incentive hold, partly because, as I've said before, the risk of being "outed" by people who knew, worked with, and trained the other black female soloists is great, especially in the internet age. But as long as we're parsing words, the claim in the first place was also aspirational: it wasn't simply a brag to have been the first black female soloist at ABT -- currently corrected to the third -- but that it was a step on the way to becoming the first black Principal Dancer. That's a lot different than this message: "I am the first black female soloist at ABT in X* years. The last time there was a female soloist was when Reagan* was President. The last last time there was a black female soloist, I was Y* years old. I had never seen a black face at ABT among my teachers or colleagues until 2010." That would pack a punch, but it isn't a way to make friends and influence people. (This is why I could never be in PR.) *The reason these aren't specific is that I just spent 10 minutes on google trying to find the names of the other two black female soloists, so I could look up when they were at ABT. With no luck. Because Copeland's Wikipedia article has been corrected to say, "She is the fourth African-American soloist, and the first in two decades with ABT," that is what a google search would bring up now, but until the correction was made, the first black soloist would be repeated as a result of that search.

Once again, I don't think either was lying, given that there's no proof that either spoke with intention to deceive. My standard is the same for both.

The prevalent explanation for Hallberg's mistake is that he didn't know, which is what I think happened in Copeland's case. That he made the mistaken claim, and that people still think he never made the claim, hasn't been given as much weight in Hallberg's case and certainly isn't discussed as regularly as Copeland's. He has been excused for the mistake by some who've said that it doesn't really matter much, because he was a prominent principal dancer and didn't have much to gain by the mistake, while Copeland has much to gain by it. I don't buy that argument, and think that if there's a standard for this, he failed it as well. I think there are several factors in Copeland's PR case. The first is that, as many have argued in different contexts, Copeland's case is unique and her life story is, in part, what makes her interesting to the media, in addition any discussion of racism, and that was the case when she was a teenager and her custody situation was a media thing. Were she a black ballerina who was brought up in Scarsdale and had been dancing since she was three, I doubt there would have been much interest if she had claimed to have faced racism, any more than it was when Tai Jimenez couldn't get a contract with a top NY company after Dance Theatre of Harlem disbanded. I think there is room for, at most, two-three black ballerina stories in the media, which was Teresa Ruth Howard's point. We had, concurrently, Copeland, DePrince's personal story plus competition results, which covered several other bases, and Adams at the Bolshoi school, which is of less interest, since the Bolshoi now runs programs for and has many more foreign students. DePrince's AD put a moratorium on press access after her book was published, and, since she was dancing in Europe, that attention was likely to die out, like with Adams, who was overshadowed by the Hallberg story, because there's little room for more than one "American dancer in Russia" meme. No one has a story to take DePrince's allotted slot. Apart from scandal, there aren't many more hooks. "Black ballerina joins Atlanta Ballet corps de ballet," might make a nice set of features in Atlanta, but "60 Minutes" isn't going to care about it. (When was the last time they cared: when they interviewed Gelsey Kirkland after "Dancing on My Grave?) The singularity aspect of her story is, of course, a draw, and speaking about other more contemporary black ballerinas like she does about Wilkinson, for example -- and her PR person might be betting on this message and developed a strategy to keep it from being diluted -- but the idea that she should be sharing the exposure and the glory, I don't think would work well, because the media is not going to care about other black ballerinas without compelling stories nor in complex messages, ie, with more than one modifier. Statements like "I'm honored to be third in a line of black ballerina soloists at ABT," let alone naming them, I'm guessing would be edited out. Copeland is also unique because she's aiming for the pinnacle of almost exclusively white ballet excellence, at least as understood in the US.

Crystal ball predictions can be fun, but season, casting, etc. information that is not backed by official sources will be removed. However, a "Crystal Ball" twitter account would have many followers, I'm sure.

I'm glad only one of the final six is playing it, but I feel the same way about Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, and I wish more had chosen the second.

Debargue is in the piano finals. The replays for his performances can be found from this round-by-round list: http://tch15.medici.tv/en/performances/piano/replay/ His Round III -- Lizst and Tchaikovsky concertos -- video is already up. Lucas Geniusas is playing Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2 now. Edited to add: Looking at the competition website, Geniusas is the only competitor who has played, will play, or had planned to play the second piano concerto: all the rest had the first in their rep. While the orchestra had to practice another concerto, I suspect the concertmaster and first cello chair were happy, given their prominence in the piece. Looking over the declared rosters, the outliers were Bartok's Third, Beethoven's Fourth, and the Saint-Saens Second. Lots of Lizst, Rachmaninov, and Prokofiev.

After the PNB season ended, Jahna Frantziskonis, Elle Macy, and Leta Biasucci performed a work by PNB dancer Price Suddarth for the Seattle International Dance Festival. Suddarth showcased the stylistic strength of each, and watching Frantziskonis, I finally put my finger on whom she reminds me a little of, which had been driving me crazy all season: Elizabeth Loscavio.

Golding danced with Angel Corella in 2008-9: http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/stage/2013/11/04/matthew_golding_makes_his_canadian_debut_in_swan_lake.html It's not in his bio on matthewgolding.com, http://www.matthewgolding.com/biography on which his Royal Ballet bio: http://www.roh.org.uk/people/matthew-golding is based.