volcanohunter

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. http://www.dancemagazine.com/blogs/wendy/3741She said much the same thing in the Wall Street Journal. http://www.dancemagazine.com/blogs/wendy/3741

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

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.

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.

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) (p.47)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. (pp.52-53)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

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. 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). (p.52, emphasis added)

The first thing I would suggest, if it's still an option, is to get yourself a balcony seat. You'll want an overhead view because the floor patterns in this ballet are something else, like looking into a kaleidoscope.

For fans of operatic rarities, here is a performance of Ferruccio Busoni's Turandot from the Dijon Opera. There are no subtitles for the benefit of non-German-speakers, but the story is familiar enough. That's fortunate, because I suspect I couldn't have followed the plot on the basis of the stage action. http://liveweb.arte....rruccio_Busoni/

Well, I'm glad to know that the upside to prostituting ballet to pop music is that you get coverage on Entertainment Tonight Canada. http://www.globaltv....deo/top+stories

Patrice Bart's Coppelia will be beamed live to U.S. cinemas on Monday, March 28, at 19.30 Paris time, or 1:30 p.m. ET. The cast is scheduled to include Dorothée Gilbert as Swanilda, Mathias Heymann as Frantz, José Martinez as Coppelius and Fabrice Bourgeois as Spalanzani. http://www.balletinc...s-opera-ballet/ http://www.operadepa...ON=SELECT_EVENT Since the Ballet in Cinema site is so difficult to navigate, here are links to some of the relevant movie houses. Big Cinema Manhattan: http://us.bigcinemas...as.asp?cid=1009 Carmike Cinemas: http://www.carmike.com/ballet.aspx Laemelle Theatres: http://www.laemmle.c...ie.php?mid=6841

There will be a number of encore screenings of Don Q in the U.S., primarily on Wednesday, March 16 (March 12 in California). Enter your ZIP code to find them. http://www.balletinc...encore-bolshoi/

The interviewees were Gennadiy Yanin during the first intermission and Yuliana Malkhasyants during the second. Fascinating stuff, though what they said could basically summed up as: there is no Petipa left in this ballet. Malkhasyants was particularly helpful in pointing out who had choreographed what to whose music. (There used to be a hornpipe in the tavern scene?!!) I guess my venue wasn't the only one with the image disruptions. It was particularly frustrating in the first act since it left the audio and picture badly out of sync. I agree that much of the camera work was terrible, starting right off with close-ups of the dancers as soon as the curtain went up rather giving the audience a nice long shot for orientation. Kitri's entrance was also atrociously filmed. They had trouble keeping Osipova in the frame. Had the cameramen not been warned that she would move big and jump high? Far too much time was spent focusing on ancillary goings-on on the sidelines. If there is going to be a DVD release, I certainly hope the film can be re-edited. I don't know whether this problem was present elsewhere, but I'm pretty sure that the aspect ratio was off at my venue, making the dancers appear more squat than they actually are. This sort of gave them a retro look, and in the case of small, muscular dancers like Osipova and Vasiliev, it did them no favours. (Since Anastasia Stashkevich looked "normal," I have to assume she's a very skinny thing.) On the other hand, every time dancers extended arms and legs to the side, their limbs looked freakishly elongated. The one upside of this was that every manner of split leap, and lord knows there's no shortage of them in this ballet, looked preternaturally spectacular. It almost goes without saying that Osipova and Vasiliev were sensational. She threatens to make even Ashley Bouder appear earth-bound. I do wish, however, that there were a bit more variety to her dancing in the each act. I'm not looking for Aurora-like differentiation, but I thought her Dulcinea was too much like her Kitri, and in the last act I would have liked a bit more epaulment in the pas de deux. She powered her way through her fouettés with such force that she couldn't quite control the ending. And I really wish she hadn't twisted her torso so out of shape to get her foot to point at the ceiling in à la seconde. Vasiliev was doing all sorts of crazy, gasp-inducing stuff, though his character didn't register as strongly as it could have. I suspect the camera work was to blame (like not focusing on him during the "suicide" scene, for crying out loud). I thought Kristina Karasyova's Mercedes was ravishing, but Anna Antropova's Gypsy came across as unhinged rather than mysterious and sexy. As much as I enjoyed Stashkevich's Cupid, I would rather she and her adorable sidekicks hadn't reappeared in the grand pas. I wonder whether anyone could enlighten me about the provenance of the Queen of the Dryads variation. I'm accustomed to the one with the jetés and développés à la seconde rather than the Bolshoi's Aurora-esque version. The ballet played at two venues in my city. Where I attended there were about 25-30 viewers and perhaps only 2 or 3 younger than 18. What a missed opportunity for young ballet students. The people who did come out seemed to be thoroughly enchanted.

Alberta Ballet's Twitter feed states that company dancer Hayna Gutierrez, a defector herself, was interviewed about the story today by The National (the CBC's nightly newscast). Presumably, this means a report will air on The National in short order.

The last multi-part ballet documentaries in English I can think of were the BBC's Dancer, hosted by Peter Schaufuss, and Ballerina, hosted by Natalia Makarova, from the mid-1980s. Perhaps they weren't documentaries so much as introductions to classical dancing. I'm pretty sure that both were carried by A&E. There was also a BBC series from the mid-1990s called The House, which dealt with, among other things, the Royal Ballet, though I don't remember whether any American network aired it. Unfortunately, the screenings of Opus Arte offerings at Canadian cinemas petered out after two-three years. Perhaps there was no audience for it, or perhaps potential audiences weren't interested in pre-recorded performances. I thought the series was very badly marketed. It's a great pity, since it strove to screen almost as many ballets as operas. Both American and Canadian chains are now attempting to relay live, or nearly live, performances from the Bolshoi Ballet, though Canada has more per-capita screens. On the other hand, Canadians don't have access to the live relays from the Paris Opera Ballet or the Royal Ballet, which have been available in at least some parts of the U.S.

The March 6 performance of Don Quixote is scheduled to star Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev. http://www.bolshoi.r...ynid26=2519#dyn A listing of U.S. and Canadian screening sites is on the Ballet in Cinema web site. Enter your location in the top right-hand corner. http://www.emergingp...e-live-bolshoi/