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There are not many old programs about ballet,  but two of the best were the Bell Telephone Hour and Dance in America.  Dance in America is shown on PBS,  the American public broadcasting system,  so it should be possible to access those programs.  I don't know who holds the rights to the Bell Telephone Hour.  The Ed Sullivan Show,  which was a fabled variety program,  often featured famous ballet dancers.   That show aired before the invention of videotape and the shows that survive are kinescopes that are not of very good quality.  You can view a great deal of televised dance at the Performing Arts branch of the New York Public Library at Lincon Center.  But many dance performances these days pop up on YouTube,  official recordings and non-official bootlegs shot by amateurs.  You can see everyone from Tamara Karsavina and Ellen Price to a just-released piece on Justin Peck.

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3 hours ago, On Pointe said:

There are not many old programs about ballet,  but two of the best were the Bell Telephone Hour and Dance in America.  Dance in America is shown on PBS,  the American public broadcasting system,  so it should be possible to access those programs.  I don't know who holds the rights to the Bell Telephone Hour.  The Ed Sullivan Show,  which was a fabled variety program,  often featured famous ballet dancers.   That show aired before the invention of videotape and the shows that survive are kinescopes that are not of very good quality.  You can view a great deal of televised dance at the Performing Arts branch of the New York Public Library at Lincon Center.  But many dance performances these days pop up on YouTube,  official recordings and non-official bootlegs shot by amateurs.  You can see everyone from Tamara Karsavina and Ellen Price to a just-released piece on Justin Peck.

Thanks for reminding everyone of these many possibilities. I would add a few:

  • If you are a PBS member (minimum $60/year), you get access to their Passport program of older programs. Many are not very interesting, but there are a few gems. Many of the old PBS programs are not available this way, due to restrictions from the rights-holders.
  • Many of the old Dance in America programs were released on DVD and are still available. Some are available for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime. 
  • Some of the subscription services (Medici, Marquee) include great ballet recordings. The Royal Ballet subscription is also a good value for their on-line library. I see other companies (especially European) have streaming subscriptions, but haven't tried them. 
  • One of the few bright spots during the COVID lock-down in 2020-21: many wonderful archived programs from NYCB, Live from Lincoln Center, etc. were released on-line. They had to get waivers from the many unions and other rights-holders involved and I doubt we'll see these again. 
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8 hours ago, California said:

One of the few bright spots during the COVID lock-down in 2020-21: many wonderful archived programs from NYCB, Live from Lincoln Center, etc. were released on-line. They had to get waivers from the many unions and other rights-holders involved and I doubt we'll see these again. 

Yes, thanks to those streams we discovered that Live from Lincoln Center broadcasts weren't owned by PBS or the ballet companies, but by Lincoln Center.

VAI Music released several DVDs of ballet performances from the Bell Telephone Hour. One disc was dedicated to the "complete performances" of Erik Bruhn and Rudolf Nureyev on the program. There was an ABT disc and a "stars of New York City Ballet" disc that featured mostly non-Balanchine ballets, and a fourth ABT+NYCB disc. There was also a mixed Bell+Radio-Canada DVD featuring Maria Tallchief. 

(There are also several discs featuring opera singers, including the "complete" Joan Sutherland and Birgit Nilsson, a violin disc, a piano disc, discs dedicated to performances by Dolores Gray, Carol Lawrence, Howard Keel, Gordon MacRae, John Raitt... Obviously, the company was given access to the program's video archives.)

The official Ed Sullivan Show channel on YouTube is uploading an ever-growing selection of remastered videos. There is comparatively little opera there, and even less ballet, but there is some. I remember when Gwen Verdon's immortal performance of "If My Friends Could See Me Now" would appear periodically on YouTube in a grainy video with numbers across the bottom and then disappear again. Finally the Ed Sullivan channel posted it in all its pristine glory. 

(It's a personal favorite of mine.)

Edited by volcanohunter
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You can find a list of Dance in America programs on IMDB and probably other sites, but I've never seen a DiA "rerun"  on YouTube.  How fabulous it would be to revisit that series. There are various excerpts of dance from the Ed Sullivan show on YouTube, such as Makarova in Black Swan from 1970. Some are of decent film quality.  

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There are also DVD's of Balanchine ballets filmed in Montreal:and originally aired on television.  They were published by VAI and had some of Balanchine's finest dancers, like d'Amboise, LeClerq, Tallchief, Adams, and Verdy, just to name a few..  The ballets included Serenade, Orpheus, Pas de Dix, Agon, Concerto Barocco, Nutcracker Pas de Deux.   They are wonderful, and they include Balanchine being interviewed by the host in French.

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I am desperately sorry that this series stopped at volume 5. There is more NYCB video in the archives of Radio-Canada, most especially: Liebeslieder!

It's also frustrating that while VAI Music reissued the National Ballet of Canada's Giselle and the abridged Sleeping Beauty, a telecast of La Fille mal gardéwas not released. As far as I know, it aired on the CBC ca. 1978 and was never broadcast again. I felt this gap less keenly after an Australian Ballet telecast was made available, the film with the original cast was reissued and once the Royal Ballet released a couple of performances from the HD era, but it really struck me as negligent to leave that telecast languishing when recordings of the ballet were thin on the ground.

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Thank you all so much for such a lot of interesting information. But my question is: is it possible to find any information about a particular TV program - "Alexander Godunov: the world to dance in". When I try to find something about it, information about the documentary (USA, 1983) appears. (Director and producer: Peter Rosen). But I need information not about the film, but about the ballet program that Godunov conducted on TV in 1983-1984. 

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9 hours ago, Meliss said:

Thank you all so much for such a lot of interesting information. But my question is: is it possible to find any information about a particular TV program - "Alexander Godunov: the world to dance in". When I try to find something about it, information about the documentary (USA, 1983) appears. (Director and producer: Peter Rosen). But I need information not about the film, but about the ballet program that Godunov conducted on TV in 1983-1984. 

If  I Google, this information about a TV shows up -- but sourcing is not clear. It sounds like there was a one-time documentary AND a TV series with the same name, viz., "Alexander Godunov: the world to dance in." Is that possible? I have no memory of ever seeing it.

===================================

AI Overview

Alexander Godunov had a TV show called Godunov: The World to Dance In that ran from 1983–84. The show featured performances, interviews, and rare Soviet footage about the Russian-American ballet dancer and actor's career: 
  • Coverage of his defection: The show covered Godunov's dramatic defection from the Soviet Union in 1979, which was watched by the world. 
  • Performances: The show included dazzling performances, including duets with Maya Plisetskaya and Cynthia Gregory. 
  • Interviews: The show featured interviews with Jacqueline Bisset and other friends. 
  • Rare Soviet footage: The show included rare Soviet footage. 
     
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Perhaps it ran on a small channel somewhere. Maybe on public access television?

The early 1980s were relatively early days for specialty channels on cable television. Bravo launched in late 1980 and was originally conceived as an arts channel, veering toward independent cinema. CBS Cable was an arts-oriented network that existed from October 1981 to December 1982. ARTS launched in 1981 and merged with The Entertainment Channel in 1984 to create A&E, which did stick to its arts mandate for longer than most and was, I think, the strongest competitor to PBS. I remember a performing arts showcase hosted by Stacy Keach in tuxedo. Most of the operas and ballets came from the NVC Arts catalog and the BBC. Some stage plays were filmed for a separate program. It went in for a lot of co-productions of literary adaptations with British television networks. A&E was the first in the U.S. to air the Pride and Prejudice series with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth and got huge ratings. It co-produced an Emma starring Kate Beckinsale, Jane Eyre with Samantha Morton and Ciarán Hinds, Ivanhoe with Steven Waddington, Victoria Smurfit, Susan Lynch and Hinds, a really fun Tom Jones with Max Beesley and Morton, narrated by John Sessions as Henry Fielding, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and a wonderful Vanity Fair starring Natasha Little. There was The Great Gatsby with Toby Stephens, Mira Sorvino and Paul Rudd, several Scarlet Pimpernel films with Richard E. Grant and Elizabeth McGovern, multiple Horatio Hornblower movies, the fascinating Race for the Double Helix with Jeff Goldblum, Tim Pigott-Smith and Juliet Stevenson and Longitude starring Michael Gambon and Jeremy Irons, and a biopic about Ernest Shackleton starring Kenneth Branagh.

I remember seeing The World to Dance In film on television, probably on A&E.

Sadly, A&E eventually abandoned its original mandate. For a long time its most popular program was Biography. Eventually the performing arts got shunted to Breakfast with the Arts in a Sunday-morning time-slot that shrank over time, then disappeared, once the network switched to true-crime and reality programs. (Though I still remember Angel Corella coming on the Breakfast program in 2001 to try to salvage ABT's Pied Piper, which was a critical and box-office bomb.) I haven't subscribed to the network for years, so I have no idea of what it airs now.

Edited by volcanohunter
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I remember there was a cable channel made possible by a pile of money given by two men who wanted to expose more people to the arts.  It was like they took all of the arts videos and put the movements, arias, and scenes on shuffle.  i remember watching just to get a glimpse of dance, but I don't remember Godunov being on it at all.  That may have been because of the rights they could procure.

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14 hours ago, California said:

  If  I Google, this information about a TV shows up -- but sourcing is not clear. It sounds like there was a one-time documentary AND a TV series with the same name, viz., "Alexander Godunov: the world to dance in." Is that possible? I have no memory of ever seeing it.

Thank you very, very much! Yes, the TV show had exactly the same name as the film! Thank you, now I know at least approximately what it was about!

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11 hours ago, Helene said:

I remember there was a cable channel made possible by a pile of money given by two men who wanted to expose more people to the arts.  It was like they took all of the arts videos and put the movements, arias, and scenes on shuffle.  i remember watching just to get a glimpse of dance, but I don't remember Godunov being on it at all.  That may have been because of the rights they could procure.

Classical Arts Showcase was the cable channel,  but sadly it seems to have disappeared.  You never knew what would pop up - ballet,  modern dance,  silent movie excerpts,  "soundies",  arias,  instrumentalists,  and oddly,  figure skating,  but only if it was done to classical music.  It was privately endowed,  so maybe it ran out of money.

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14 hours ago, California said:

If  I Google, this information about a TV shows up -- but sourcing is not clear. It sounds like there was a one-time documentary AND a TV series with the same name, viz., "Alexander Godunov: the world to dance in." Is that possible? I have no memory of ever seeing it.

===================================

AI Overview

Alexander Godunov had a TV show called Godunov: The World to Dance In that ran from 1983–84. The show featured performances, interviews, and rare Soviet footage about the Russian-American ballet dancer and actor's career: 
  • Coverage of his defection: The show covered Godunov's dramatic defection from the Soviet Union in 1979, which was watched by the world. 
  • Performances: The show included dazzling performances, including duets with Maya Plisetskaya and Cynthia Gregory. 
  • Interviews: The show featured interviews with Jacqueline Bisset and other friends. 
  • Rare Soviet footage: The show included rare Soviet footage. 
     

No, unfortunately, all this information is not about the show, but about Rosen's documentary. What the show was about remains a mystery. 

Britannica - the TV show is mentioned in the last paragraph.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alexander-Godunov

Edited by Meliss
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31 minutes ago, On Pointe said:

Classical Arts Showcase was the cable channel,

That's it!  I lost many, many hours going down that rathole, before the Internet, where the rat hole possibilities are seemingly endless.

About the show, the tapes of it might not even exist anymore.  Not every entity kept all of their library or was particularly careful about the objects, and sometimes media degraded, became damaged, was misfiled, was erased and reused for something else, etc.  I don't think many media companies at the time envisioned a world when there's a demand for everything and where they didn't control access and when/if something would be broadcast/re-broadcast.  Physical storage is expensive, while there's still a perception of Cloud storage being, if not free, cheaper than maintaining buildings.  It was a very different mindset.

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41 minutes ago, Helene said:

About the show, the tapes of it might not even exist anymore. 

Perhaps, of course, it is so. But not a single mention in the press, anywhere at all, except for Britannica... And at the same time, the show ran for 2 years. No one has seen, heard, knows, remembers...

Edited by Meliss
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13 minutes ago, Meliss said:

Perhaps, of course, it is so. But not a single mention in the press, anywhere at all, except for Britannica... And at the same time, the show ran for 2 years. No one has seen, heard, knows, remembers...

Not everything is documented everywhere.  Someone had to think it was important enough to mention, and their mention would have to be seen as important enough to be searchable.  There is a lot that hasn't been put online.  If it aired on a private cable channel, chances are it is one among many shows that weren't documented.

It's also possible that it was a show that was expected to air, and announced in a press release or interview, but never materialized, which could mean never created, or created and never shown.

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