volcanohunter

Yes, the POB performed at the Met; Manuel Legris was made an étoile on its stage. Lots of companies visited in the 1980s: the Kirov, Royal Danish Ballet, Australian Ballet, London Festival Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, among others. (For whatever reason, when the Bolshoi visited in 1979 and 1990 they performed at the State Theater.) In the spring of 1990 Anna Kisselgoff even wrote a piece in the NYT that began: "Imagine the unimaginable – the Metropolitan Opera House in the summer without companies like the Royal Ballet from Britain, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Paris Opera Ballet, the Kirov Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, the Netherlands Dance Theater, the London Festival Ballet, the Stuttgart Ballet, the National Ballet of Canada, Roland Petit's National Ballet of Marseilles and so on." http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/15/arts/dance-view-ballet-at-the-met-a-british-bundle-of-fresh-ideas.html I really miss those days.

Filin has formally returned to work as artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet. Galina Stepanenko is now company manager, a post that had been vacant since Ruslan Pronin's dismissal. http://izvestia.ru/news/558348

Presumably ABT could break up its usual spring-summer season into two parts. A 'spring' season (March-April) following NYCB's winter season, and a 'summer' season (June-July) after NYCB's spring season. I would think that for New Yorkers having access to live ballet year-round would be a great boon. Such a schedule might also be easier on ABT's corps de ballet.

ABT spends quite a bit of time on the road, so its sets have been made to fit into a variety of venues.

When the National Ballet of Canada moved from the O'Keefe/Hummingbird/Sony Centre (3,200 seats) to the Four Seasons Centre (2,070 seats) it accommodated its subscriber base by increasing its total number of performances. The company had to deal with a significant decrease in available orchestra seats also, but the move hasn't bankrupted the National Ballet, so obviously it can be made to work.

This is a French television report about the imminent retirement of Agnès Letestu. http://videos.tf1.fr/jt-we/2013/a-l-opera-garnier-agnes-letestu-tire-sa-reverence-avec-la-dame-8282941.html

Male casting for the forthcoming run of Onegin has been shuffled. Wieslaw Dudek of the Staatsballett Berlin will appear as Onegin opposite Evgenia Obraztsova. Artem Ovcharenko takes over Dmitry Gudanov's performance as Lensky, and Ivan Alexeyev goes into Ovcharenko's original spot. Oct 10, 12e - Smirnova, Lantratov, Tikhomirova, Chudin, Biktimirov Oct 11 - Obraztsova, Dudek, Stashkevich, Ovcharenko, Vodopetov Oct 12m - Kretova, Skvortsov, Khokhlova, Alexeyev, Khromushin

Owing to injury, the part of Crassus in the Bolshoi's broadcast of Spartacus will be danced by Vladislav Lantratov rather than Alexander Volchkov. http://www.bolshoi.ru/en/performances/47/roles/#20131020190000

If anyone is interested in seeing Waltz's Sacre performed by her own company, a complete performance is available on the La Monnaie web site. Be warned that unlike the Mariinsky version, this one includes nudity. Available on demand until October 20. http://www.lamonnaie.be/en/mymm/media/1792/Sacre%20-%20Sasha%20Waltz/

The Royal Ballet has posted more detailed casting for its October 16 screening of Don Quixote. Subject to change, of course. Kitri - Marianela Nuñez Basilio - Carlos Acosta Don Quixote - Christopher Saunders Sancho Panza - Philip Mosley Espada - Ryoichi Hirano Mercedes - Laura Morera Gamache - Bennet Gartside Lorenzo - Gary Avis http://www.roh.org.uk/showings/don-quixote-2013 The linked page also includes a search box to find nearby screenings. Some relevant presenter links. U.S. http://www.fathomevents.com/#!don-quixote Canada http://www.cineplex.com/Events/DanceSeries/Home.aspx France http://www.cotediffusion.fr/thematique/ballet

The Roots, a piece by Kader Attou for his company Accrorap and presented this month at the Maison de la Danse in Lyon, is available for viewing on demand for the next half year or so. http://liveweb.arte.tv/fr/video/Kader_Attou_presente_The_Roots/

It shouldn't. The survey questions were prefaced with the statement "With the exception of elementary or high school performances..." I would guess this was intended to exclude school recitals in the respondent's mind. http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/SPPA-Questionnaire-2012.pdf It's entirely possible that ballet is more readily available, or more frequently available than opera. In many cities it's not unusual for opera companies to stage only three or four productions a year. If the local ballet company presents, let's say, five or six programs, this provides locals with more potential opportunities to attend. And opera tickets are frequently significantly more expensive than ballet tickets, which would also work against opera's popularity. Many cities with no opera or ballet company will nevertheless have a local symphony orchestra, making classical music concerts that much more available. The reports on the audience survey of 2008 did not mention data on movie-going or general live music attendance. Perhaps the information is intended to provide context. For example, 15% attendance at musicals may not seem like much, but only 59% of Americans go to the movies, despite them being readily available nationwide. Fewer than 9% of Americans go to classical music concerts, but then only 31.6 % of adults go to see live music of any kind.

Incidentally, I remember a playbill for a fairly recent Ailey run at BAM that included an ad for New York City Ballet's season, which was running concurrently. I'd be genuinely curious to find out whether the advertising was effective in attracting Ailey patrons that hadn't been to City Ballet before. As far as I can recall, ABT did not try to target that audience.

Of course, and that's why the NEA survey also analyzes audiences on the basis of educational level, though apparently it does not ask about income. But I think we can ask ourselves whether we see enough "people of color" at the ballet in, say, New York, and generally speaking I think we'd have to admit that the answer is no.

Another factor is changing demographic composition, as the U.S. population becomes progressively less white. This was already discussed by those who looked into the numbers of the last audience participation survey in 2008. The NEA credits the uptick in jazz attendance to an increase in its non-white and non-Hispanic audience. Purveyors of European and Euro-American art forms like ballet undoubtedly need to increase their non-white and non-Asian audiences.

Here is the link to the NEA's own summary. http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/highlights-from-2012-SPPA.pdf Besides the a decline in live attendence, which the NEA characterizes as statistically insignificant, what's also important is how many people are relying on electronic media for their arts consumption. (Is YouTube helping or hurting?) I find the "real" numbers on p. 12 helpful. 20.7 million American adults attended at least one classical music concert in 2012 19 million went to a jazz concert 13.2 million saw a non-ballet dance performance 12 million attended a Latin music concert 6.3 million went to the ballet 4.9 million attended the opera

Yup, and to figure out why ABT didn't do much with Golding during the six years that it had him.

Between his performances with the Dutch National Ballet and Royal Ballet and guest appearances with English National Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada, Golding is going to be very busy. http://www.ballet.org.uk/whats-on/lecorsaire/ http://national.ballet.ca/uploadedFiles/MediaReleases/Svetlana%20Lunkina%20and%20Evan%20McKie%20New%20Principal%20Guest%20Artists.pdf

Lobukhin is an ideal Grigorovich dancer. His Tybalt in the film version of Romeo and Juliet was just about its only redeeming feature. He may be a Vaganova-trained Petersburger, but he is more Old Bolshoi than any male dancer the Moscow Ballet School has produced in several generations. In effect, Yuri Burlaka hired him to dance precisely this repertoire.

Frances Chung was born and trained in Canada, so her exclusion may boil down to that.

Great to see the Royal Ballet fight for the American market, even if this particular avenue is closed to the opera company. But it sure hasn't been easy. This will be their third distributor in the U.S. I'm with you; hopefully these screenings will be a success, and others will follow.

I think your point is right on the nose. The fact is that most American movie theaters aren't going to give up their normal fare and evening time slots to show arts programming, at least not if they haven't got multiple screens at their disposal. And that may ultimately be what's working against the Royal Ballet and its weeknight broadcasts. The number of people willing to come watch ballet on Sunday at 11 am, however small, is still likely to be bigger than the number able to come on Wednesday afternoon at 2:30. Incidentally, Big Cinemas Manhattan will be showing Spartacus live on October 20 at 11:00 am ET, and the winners of the casting sweepstakes are Mikhail Lobukhin (Spartacus), Anna Nikulina (Phrygia), Svetlana Zakharova (Aegina) and Alexander Volchkov (Crassus).

The Bolshoi has finally posted the next round of Onegin casting. Oct 10, 12e - Smirnova, Lantratov, Tikhomirova, Chudin, Biktimirov Oct 11 - Obraztsova, Volchkov, Stashkevich, Gudanov, Vodopetov Oct 12m - Kretova, Skvortsov, Khokhlova, Ovcharenko, Khromushin

And yet if American ballet fans don't attend the Bolshoi screenings en masse the likelihood of getting the Royal or POB are extremely slim. I can't see the distributors expanding their offerings unless large audiences lead them to believe that the market has potential. In Canada the experiment began with the Bolshoi, and initially I was also sorry it wasn't a different company. As it happens, I subsequently changed my mind and came to love the Bolshoi broadcasts. Of course I was only too happy to see the series expand to the Royal Ballet as well, but I doubt this would have happened if the Bolshoi had flopped. Not that I'm unsympathetic to your position. Now that the Bolshoi has run out of 19th-century repertoire and is avoiding repetition for the present, we're probably going to be treated to the complete Grigorovich canon, a prospect that does not exactly appeal to me. But I also know that if I don't vote with my pocketbook, the whole enterprise could disappear, and that would be worse than sitting through Spartacus.

I would have thought that if it were a matter of choosing only one company, the ROH would be a more obvious fit for Emerging PIctures because its ballets and operas could be bundled together. But if the company's client cinemas find that the demand for ballet is insufficient to warrant 10 or 11 performances, it may have come down to looking at box office returns. If the Bolshoi has drawn more viewers than the RB in the past, a company trying to make a profit would make its choice accordingly. It's a shame. I suppose those living close enough to the norther border could cross over for screenings, but it's hardly a practical solution. http://www.cineplex.com/Events/DanceSeries/ParticipatingTheatres.aspx