volcanohunter

What I've tracked down on DVD so far is the glorious presentation of Act III of Sleeping Beauty--witht eh Apotheosis missing sadly--from the DVD A New Year's Celebration in St Petersburg. It's one of the more pricey ballet DVDs I own, and frustrating it only has the one act but really, for me, it's worth it.

The New Year's DVD with Act III is back at Berkshire Record Outlet for $14. Since shopping via the Amazon search box above supports this board, I should also point out that the DVD is selling there for far less than it once did.

http://www.berkshirerecordoutlet.com/search.php?row=0&brocode=140748&stocknum=&submit=Find+Item&text=&filter=all

Lily, there was indeed a separate thread on the screening, but for the life of me I can't find it.

I thought it was quite charming. Naturally, there was narration. Unfortunately, the narrators also recited occasional poems over the music, and, worse yet, sang some lyrics, too. I suppose there's nothing that remains uncorrupted once the film industry gets involved. But I thought there was more than enough to compensate, especially Claudia Corday's delightful heroine. (I was astonished that she could perform such beautiful fouettés while wearing an enormous bouffant.) I'm not at all sold on giving Coppelius a (young!) love interest, but someone must have thought that Walter Slezak couldn't come away empty handed. Personally, I never feel much sympathy for Coppelius, though I know that many people feel that the youngin's are too hard on him.

The choreography is credited entirely to Jo Anna Kneeland, though Alicia Markova is listed as an artistic consultant. Much of the ballet was rechoreographed, so I think that's fair. Like the orchestra, the ballet company came from the Liceu, and it was most agreeable to see real ballet dancers on the screen. So often what had passed for ballet in old musicals was beyond cringe-inducing. Here the dancing was presented pretty much straight. The film was shot on 70mm film, and the widescreen picture is spectacular.

So, in the U.S. the film was followed by Tales of Hoffmann. In Canada it was followed by Invitation to the Dance. Hooray! That's a lot more ballet than I've seen on TV in a very long time.

The scheduled cast for Coppélia on May 29 is Natalia Osipova as Swanhilda, Vyacheslav Lopatin as Franz, and Gennadi Yanin as Coppélius (interesting!).

http://www.bolshoi.ru/en/season/ballet/repertoire/detail.php?&id26=283&act26=info&dynact26=afisha&dynid26=2597#dyn

Here's a report from French television with Nanette Glushak rehearsing her company for a program that includes Scotch Symphony and Raymonda Variations.

http://culturebox.france3.fr/#/danse_classique/34918/dans-les-coulisses-du-ballet-du-capitole

On a related note, the company in Nice is presenting a program of American works this weekend, with Balanchine's Allegro Brillante, David Parsons' The Envelope and Gene Kelly's Pas de Dieux. Comments from Eric Vu-An and Claude Bessy.

http://culturebox.france3.fr/#/danse_classique/34840/les-choregraphes-americains-a-l_opera-de-nice

Though it's not listed on the TCM web site, my onscreen TV guide tells me that Invitation will air on the Canadian version of Turner Classic Movies this Sunday at 9:45 p.m. ET/6:45 p.m. PT.

Maybe or maybe not.

The stream quality isn't especially good, and I don't know whether there are any geographical restrictions, but the ballet will be available on the Knowledge Network site for the next week or two.

http://www.knowledge.ca/program/the-fiddle-and-the-drum

I can't watch this thing without some bitterness because to my mind Alberta Ballet's been on a downward trajectory ever since. I'm convinced that the only really good thing the company's produced since is Yukichi Hattori's Seven Deadly Sins, and it distresses me to no end to see Jean Grand-Maître fritter away his talent on pop extravaganzas, Olympic extravaganzas, and so on endlessly.

Edited to add: Something just ocurred to me. Could Carreno's strange costume had something to do with TV tight censorship...?

I doubt it, not if you consider what sprinters, wrestlers (the real ones), swimmers, divers, etc. wear these days. Not to mention ballroom dancers.

Here's a brief report from French television on Béjart's company three and a half years following his death.

http://videos.tf1.fr/jt-we/gil-roman-et-l-heritage-de-maurice-bejart-6379110.html

I'm reading that she was apparently peeved because she didn't get a mention in Portman's Oscar speech, which if true might account for the oddly belated timing of her complaints/charges.

According to the Wendy Perron blog post that seemed to get this "controversy" rolling, Lane had already read the writing on the wall and wasn't expecting a mention in Portman's Oscar speech.

I asked her if she was expecting to be thanked when she heard Portman reel off 10 or 20 other names during her acceptance speech. Lane said no, because a Fox Searchlight producer had already called to ask her to stop giving interviews until after the Oscars. "They were trying to create this facade that she had become a ballerina in a year and a half," she said. "So I knew they didn't want to publicize anything about me."

She said much the same thing in the Wall Street Journal.

Were you upset on Oscar night that you weren't thanked by Portman from the podium as a lot of people were?

I wasn't upset, because I knew that she wasn't going to thank me. I already knew what was going on, so I didn't expect it. Of course I feel like I was cheated a little bit. I understand that they had to do what they had to do politically to make a low-budget movie an Oscar movie. And I know that it wasn't necessarily a personal thing. Unfortunately I was the one, and ballet itself, that was discredited.

Today I saw the spot for this on TCM also, and it was heavy on dancing: lots of pointe shoes, tulle and heel stamping. The page bart linked has a few brief clips from the film (which also includes cartoons!).

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/84442/Mysterious-House-of-Dr-C-The/videos.html#movieclips

That looks absolutely wonderful! Is it fair to say it's like a Parisian version of Konservatoriet or is there more at work here?

My understanding is that Bart's conception is a good deal darker. He is dealing with one of the seamier periods in the POB's history, a time when impoverished girls like Marie Van Goethem basically had three career prospects: laundress, dancer or prostitute, and when the distinction between dancer and prostitute wasn't always clear, as implied by the omnipresence of the abonnés in top hats and tails.

I expect that the documentary Degas and the Dance or the Private Life of a Masterpiece episode about The Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen would make good companion pieces.

I don't think that anyone with any sense believes that Portman is a ballet dancer or could be one if she so desired, just as I don't believe anyone with any sense believes that Mickey Rourke, Sylvester Stallone, Mark Wahlberg or Hillary Swank are, or could be, boxers even though they have played boxers to acclaim in films and had to train physically for their roles.

Well, they may not have much sense, but after the film was released people were contacting Covent Garden and NYCB to find out when Portman would be dancing in Swan Lake. I wonder, were there similar cases of people expecting to see Stallone in a title fight?

I notice that a recent POB performance of Patrice Bart's La petite danseuse de Degas will be released on DVD and Blu-ray in the U.K. on April 26. The cast includes Clairemarie Osta, Dorothée Gilbert, Mathieu Ganio, José Martinez, Benjamin Pech, Élisabeth Maurin, Stéphanie Romberg and Emmanuel Thibault. Here's a brief clip:

http://culturebox.france3.fr/#/danse_classique/33079/la-petite-danseuse-de-degas-par-le-choregraphe-patrice-bart-le-28-fevrier-sur-france-2

On one occasion when I went to Paris I was also trying not to look like a tourist, mostly to avoid being mugged. I must be pretty good at it because people ask me for directions no matter where I am. So I packed nice, understated outfits and bought a new handbag and some terrific shoes. When my plane arrived in Paris, I was informed that my suitcase had gone to Port of Spain. It took nearly three days for my bag to catch up with me. I could have gone shopping for new stuff, but I enjoy shopping about as much as a root canal, so for several days I went to the opera and theatre wearing my travel clothes and shoes. That'll teach you a lesson about vanity, though I'm sure no one else noticed anything at all.

There's apparently going to be an encore screening, but i can't find any other reference to it.

Most of the encore screenings will take place on April 6, or April 2 in California. If you can get the page to work, the screenings are listed on the Ballet in Cinema web site.

http://www.balletincinema.com/titles/coppelia-paris-opera-ballet/

I could take a drive to Montana to see it. I haven't visited Montana yet.

Thank you for your review, goro. Unfortunately, the ballet isn't being shown in my neck of the woods. I'm sorry that I won't have the opportunity to compare Bart's version, however peculiar it may be, with the Bolshoi's staging when it comes to the screen in a couple months' time.

Was the aspect ratio correct? I hope the dancers weren't distorted on screen.

The trailer:

Gene Kelly's all-dance film Invitation to the Dance will finally be released on DVD on April 29. Amazon is taking orders. The cast includes Igor Youskevitch, Claire Sombert, Tamara Toumanova, Claude Bessy, Tommy Rall and a sensational Diana Adams.

As an anti-copying measure, DVDs from the WB Archive Collection are generally designed to play only on non-recording DVD players. They won't play on computers or recording DVD players, though the Amazon listing for this release does not include such a warning. Not yet, anyway.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049367/

Part of the problem with the data is that it doesn't define clearly what arts education is. Public school art classes? Extracurricular ballet lessons? High school band?

For the purposes of the study, adult is defined as anyone over the age of majority. I would expect that many of those who reported receiving an arts education in adulthood got it at university. I don't think that my undergrad program was unique in having a mandatory fine arts component. We had a choice of introductory courses in art history, film studies, dramatic arts, music history and, for more intrepid souls, music theory. Hands-on courses in painting, acting or playing an instrument were restricted to majors in those areas. I suspect the reasons for this were entirely practical. It's feasible to lead a historical or theoretical course in a lecture hall packed with 200 students. It would be impossible to teach 50 people at once to play the oboe. To the extent that they were offered, dance courses were restricted to phys ed and drama majors, but then my alma mater didn't have a BFA program in dance. However, the university's recreation department offered extracurricular ballet classes alongside yoga, karate and swimming lessons. There was also a modern dance club that staged a show annually, and there was a social dancing club, of course. My recollection of the ballet and modern classes is that their participants were overwhelmingly female, and I'm told it was the same with the ballroom dancing club.

My mother was music teacher at a large elementary school, so I have some idea of what arts education in her school district looks like. Music classes consist of choral singing and learning to play the recorder (because the plastic ones are dirt cheap), xylophones and African drums. Older children also receive guitar instruction. (My elementary school had a string orchestra, though I understand it's since been "privatized.") This is designed to give children basic music-reading skills and performing experience. There is also a music appreciation component to broaden the pupils' grasp of music. Theoretical and historical courses don't work well with young pupils, though my high school music teacher was of the historical inclination. ("Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg on May 7, 1833...," he would drone on. It didn't go over well.) For what it's worth, what my mother's pupils enjoyed playing most on their recorders was Beethoven's Ode to Joy. They also loved singing Bach chorales, though cheerful children's songs were big hits, too.

Unlike music classes, art classes in elementary schools tend not to be taught by specialists. Apparently, most homeroom teachers find teaching the course "easy," because children sit happily at their desks with their crayons, construction paper, glitter and glue. The teachers have the children execute projects set out in the teacher's handbook, and the art appreciation component comes in having children copy sample works of art. I expect that the extracurricular classes offered by art museums are much more comprehensive.

My mother aimed to give her pupils some ballet appreciation by showing videos of child-friendly ballets. The Nutcracker was an obvious choice, especially since it fit nicely into the lull between the Christmas concert and Christmas holidays. Some children would watch, say, Damian Woetzel spin at dizzying speeds and scoff, claiming that they could do the same. Others, the ones enrolled in extracurricular dance lessons, would protest that their classmates could do no such thing. I think that illustrates how arts lessons increase appreciation.

Here is the report on arts education and arts participation.

http://www.nea.gov/research/2008-SPPA-ArtsLearning.pdf

Researchers Nick Rabkin and E.C. Hedberg admit that they are hobbled by the available data. The NEA's survey doesn't ask especially detailed questions about the sort of arts education people received in childhood, nor have the same questions been asked over the years. As they point out, the collected data doesn't distinguish between someone who received 10 years of one-on-one piano instruction from someone who spent a few months learning to play the recorder in public school, and it doesn't record whether either enjoyed the experience. Likewise, there aren't reliable statistics available about what sort of arts education is actually available in public schools. All that can safely be said is that music and visual arts classes are far more prevalent in elementary schools than drama or dance, and that while the availability of drama classes increases in high school, dance classes become even rarer than before. Furthermore, the arts are often not compulsory subjects in high schools.

What can be gleaned seems predictable enough. Poor children are less likely to get an arts education than wealthy children, and the children of parents who received an arts education are likelier to get one themselves. The more artforms studied, the better. The person who studied piano, ballet and art in childhood is more likely to attend arts events than the person who studied only one of them. Among those who didn't receive an arts education in childhood, 27.3% attended at least one arts event in 2008, as opposed to 51.5% of those who studied one artform, 63% of those who studied two, 73.5% of those who studied three, 76.4% of those who studied four, and 81.2% of those who studied five artforms (p.30). Overall, 57.3% of adults who received some sort of arts education in childhood attended at least one performing arts event, as did 69.5% of those who took arts education classes as adults. Some 90% of people who received arts education as adults had also received it as children, and the more artforms they studied in childhood, the more likely they were to continue studying the arts in adulthood. (So, off to ballet class, everybody!)

The problem for arts organizations is that arts education in public schools has been in decline since the late 1970s, and while it rebounded somewhat by the 1990s, some anecdotal evidence suggests that it has declined further since the introduction of No Child Left Behind in 2001, since schools are urged to concentrate on basic academic skills. However, this cannot be confirmed by the available data, or lack thereof. White children have been relatively unaffected the reduction in arts education in the school system--57.9% of young white adults had received at least some arts training--but the number of minority children receiving arts education has fallen significantly, to 28.1% among Hispanics and 26.2% of African Americans. (fig. 24)

[T]he decline in the rate of childhood arts education among white children is relatively insignificant from 1982 to 2008, just five percent, while the declines in the rate among African American and Hispanic children are quite substantial — 49 percent for African American and 40 percent for Hispanic children. These statistics support the conclusion that almost the entire decline in childhood arts education between the 1982 and 2008 SPPAs was absorbed by African American and Hispanic children. The findings also lend further credibility to the hypothesis that the declines for those children resulted from declines in arts education in the schools, where African American and Hispanic children were the most likely to have received any arts instruction.

The effect is already being felt. In 2008 41.7% of young white adults had attended a performing arts event, while 24.9% of non-whites did the same. This tendency will present additional challenges to arts organizations in the future, as the racial composition of the United States continues to change.

Finally, there's this bit at the end.

The arts themselves have changed in many significant ways since the first SPPA in 1982. Some of those changes have been driven by artists who, as artists often do, have rebelled against many of the conventions of the art world. The traditional art forms have been transformed, deconstructed, and integrated. Enormous passion and interest is now directed at media and forms that hardly existed at the time of the first SPPA. Our assumptions about cultural hierarchy — terms like "high" or "fine" art, "pop" and "folk" art — have lost their traditional meanings, or lost their meaning altogether. And new expectations about how we participate in culture have developed in the wake of the computer age, the Internet, the do-it-yourself (DIY) phenomenon, the rock concert, and hip hop. The future of the arts may not lie in the restoration of higher levels of "benchmark" attendance at traditional performances and exhibitions, desirable as those ends may be. Rather, it could lie in new kinds of arts experiences and participation that are more active, that blur the line between performer and audience, that make the beholder a part of the creative process and artists the animators of community life — experiences which, for some people, hold more personal value than sitting in an audience. Those kinds of experiences are being developed by artists and arts organizations, often in their education programs, in communities and schools across the country, and we need to know more about them.

If this is true, it's bad news for ballet companies. However, such a conclusion is completely beyond the scope of the study, and the researchers don't provide the slightest bit of evidence to back up this assertion.

Perhaps it can be found in this report on a "multi-modal understanding of arts participation," but I haven't read it yet.

http://www.nea.gov/research/2008-SPPA-BeyondAttendance.pdf

The NEA is promising additional follow-up reports on the 2008 survey, including one on the impact that arts education has on audience participation. There is a well-established correlation between educational level and arts attendance, but a forthcoming report will test the assumption "that participation in arts lessons and classes is the most significant predictor of arts participation later in life." Apparently, the answer is yes, which means that arts education in schools becomes a big issue for arts organizations. If this is true, though, I am at a loss to understand why ballet is having such difficulty attracting young audiences. Did all the little girls who took ballet lessons grow up to hate the artform?

The single scariest stat in Stern's report is in the chart on p.50, which indicates that in 2008 67.2% of American adults didn't attend any performing arts events. That number was 61% in 1982. Either way it's a terrible figure with all sorts of bad political implcations. Of the others, 10.1% are "omnivores" (down from 15.1% in 1982), 5.3% are "highbrows" (6.1% in 1982) and the remaining 17.4% aren't classified. I would assume most in the last group are people who attend a single arts event in the course of a year rather than people fanatically devoted to a single discipline.

Stern is primarily interested in the age issue, and he argues that the preoccupation with "graying" audiences is overblown because baby boomers constitute a disproportionally large part of the population, and every time they move from one age bracket to the next, it skews the stats. However, this doesn't alter the fact that audiences are shrinking across the board, and that some artforms, like ballet and especially jazz, are not attracting younger people in the same numbers they once did. Opera has never attracted many young people, so the fact that it's worst off in this regard is hardly surprising.

I don't see why targeting "omnivores" would be a risky strategy. What characterizes them is that they are not snobs, their tastes are very broad, and they are especially active arts consumers. Averaging up the stats between 1982 and 2008, Stern notes that "[o]mnivores represent the most active segment of the entire arts audience. They go to more types of arts activities than other groups, and they go to more individual events than others. In fact, although the omnivores represented only 13 percent of the population, they accounted for 58 percent of all events attended between 1992 and 2008." (p.20) Wouldn't that make them the target demographic?

Somewhere on this board I remember a discussion about whether there is much cross-genre advertising in the arts (I mean ballet companies advertising in orchestra playbills, and so forth). Our consensus seemed to be that there wasn't, which, in light of the stats, is an extremely stupid oversight. But I notice that in an e-mail I received yesterday from the New York Philharmonic, there was a discount offer for City Opera tickets. (25% off L'elisir tickets priced $40 or higher, March 22-26; code NYP25 for online purchases, if anyone's interested.) Its success or failure would certainly test my theory about encouraging ominvorism and highbrowism.

http://www.nycopera.com/calendar/view.aspx?id=12515&utm_source=s110099&utm_medium=m110003&utm_campaign=c110020

I suspect that if Canadian National Ballet were able to attract a larger audience, requiring more showings, then each show might be profitable. But with so much preparation and fixed costs going into each production and only a few showings, it's tough to make the numbers work.

The National Ballet of Canada has been doing more shows since it moved into its current home. The Four Seasons Centre holds considerably fewer people than the Sony/Hummingbird/O'Keefe Centre. But Toronto really needed a proper opera house; the acoustics at the O'Keefe were so bad that microphones had to be placed in the orchestra pit. If anything, I suspect that the current arrangement is more expensive because putting on more shows requires paying unionized musicians and stage crews that much more.

In November 2006 the National Ballet officially moved from the Hummingbird Centre to the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, which it shares with the Canadian Opera Company. In terms of the budget, this move represents additional fixed costs of $1.4 million annually.

The Hummingbird Centre has 3,200 seats and played host to 68 performances in the 2005 season. The new venue has 2,000 seats and will require 83 annual performances...which explains the $1.4 million annual increase in fixed costs

http://neumann.hec.c...0Canada,%20.pdf

I suspect it means that arts organizations are dependent on a relatively small group of people, who go to see all sorts of stuff, and if that core group reduces its attendance just a little bit, the bottom starts to fall out. Since building new audiences seems to be exceedingly difficult, perhaps arts organizations ought to be giving existing audiences incentives to attend more often.

I have a feeling that existing subsciption systems may not be sufficiently flexible. Several years ago my local symphony orchestra included quotes from subscribers in its season brochure. These people ranged from those who'd started subscribing a year or two earlier to those who'd been attending for 40 years straight. The quote that made my blood run cold came from a couple who had "switched" from the ballet to the symphony several years earlier. Perhaps their budget hadn't allowed them to subscribe to both organizations, yet Stern seems to suggest that arts organizations are dependent on people who attend both.

In my city the bare minimum to which a "highbrow" could subsribe would be, say, four symphony concerts, four ballets, three operas and a two-play pass to the Shakespeare festival. Assuming this would involve the purchase of two tickets to each show, that's 13 performances and 26 tickets. This may be more than many budgets can manage, even with the discounts often included in subscriptions.

Perhaps institutions like Lincoln Center ought to introduce a discount card that would allow people to get lower ticket prices at all of its venues and, hopefully, encourage greater attendance at a variety of events, particularly among those unwilling or unable to commit to a subscription. Performing arts organizations in other cities coule devise similar schemes. I know they'd rather have full-season subscribers, but that may not be a realistic option for some people.

Mark J. Stern of the University of Pennsylvania has written a follow-up report on the NEA's audience participation survey: Age and Arts Participation: A Case Against Demographic Destiny.

http://www.nea.gov/r...08-SPPA-Age.pdf

It's a pretty dense thing, and I'm not a statistician, but he links the precipitous decline in arts attendance to the decline of the "omnivore" (who attends a wide range and a large number of arts events) and "highbrow" (who attends a large number of various "high" arts events).

The average number of events attended by omnivores and highbrows dropped sharply between 2002 and 2008. Omnivores' average number of events attended fell from 12.1 to 11.0 events per year, a decline of 9 percent. Highbrow attendance fell by 11 percent — from 6.1 to 5.5 events per year — while other participants' attendance held steady. (See Figure 13, page 53.)

Between 2002 and 2008, a double blow hit cultural participation. First, the proportion of the population that we characterize as omnivores — individuals who attend a variety of different cultural forms — dropped sharply. At the same time, as with the rest of the population, the number of events that omnivores attended also fell — by more than one event per respondent. Taken together, the decline of omnivores' share of the population and their drop in average number of events attended represented 82 percent of the entire decline in individual attendance at benchmark arts events between 2002 and 2008.