From the San Francisco Ballet’s 2007 production:

It’s impossible to know everything about every art form that enriches our culture. We all have blind spots, and filling those in for us is where a critic can be most useful.

Alastair Macaulay failed in this role when, in his now much discussed review, he said this about Jenifer Ringer and Jared Angle’s performances in the New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker:

Jenifer Ringer, as the Sugar Plum Fairy, looked as if she’d eaten one sugar plum too many; and Jared Angle, as the Cavalier, seems to have been sampling half the Sweet realm. They’re among the few City Ballet principals who dance like adults, but without adult depth or complexity. 

Because Macaulay didn’t explain to us how Ringer’s and Angle’s weight related to the superficiality of the dancing, we can only conclude that he was taking a cheap shot at dancers he just didn’t like. (Ringer went on the Today Show to defend herself.) Macaulay missed an opportunity to explain the connection between body image and movement in ballet (as opposed to other forms of dance, for example).

I certainly would welcome that deeper critical discussion; I suspect most reasonably intelligent people curious about dance would. But, having read Macaulay’s follow-up defense of his review, I doubt he has the capacity to give us this anyway. Best just to move on. (See, anyone can sucker punch.)

The night before our trip to Manhattan for the New York Theatre Ballet’s abbreviated Nutcracker last Sunday, I came across, on Netflix, the 1986 film version with the Pacific Northwest Ballet and the London Symphony Orchestra.

To cut down the ballet to a child-friendly one hour, the New York Theatre Ballet omitted the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, so I thought I’d post the clip from Nutcracker: The Motion Picture here; Kadoty86 has a number of scenes on her YouTube channel. The dancer is Patricia Barker, who retired back in 2007 as a favorite of many dance fans in Seattle.

The NYBT production we saw with the children the next day was precious, in a good way. The choreography made it easy to follow the story while also giving the dancers lots of room to show their stuff. It was a young group that danced with verve; my daughter was transfixed.

The only distraction was the tinny recorded music. I know that the company can’t afford a full band, but surely someone can put together a good chamber version that would be affordable and engaging.

But if you want to give your children the Nutcracker experience, this is the one. It’s short, pretty, and good.

Back in March, the Honolulu Symphony filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (as the Louisville Orchestra recently did) to get out from under their debt. Today, the board acknowledged that the financial weight was overwhelming when they asked a US bankruptcy court to change their status to Chapter 7 and let them liquidate all assets. The judge granted the request.

There was a whole lot of nothin’ going on in Detroit today, but yesterday in Charleston it looks as if the orchestra will be up and running again.

Although the Charleston Symphony Orchestra board and musicians reached a contract agreement last week, they hadn’t settled the sticky matter of a National Labor Review Board complaint that the musicians’ union had filed against the orchestra for stopping work last March.

Yesterday, as reported on the Charleston Post and Courier website, the union will drop the complaint in return for musician control over 23% of the board seats. As constituted, that means that the musicians will nominate members to hold 5 of 21 seats. They had asked for 10.

They had also asked that the board president and negotiating chair resign; no word on whether that will happen.

The Charleston Symphony lost 12 musicians in this contract–they’re down to only 24–and their base pay is now only $14,000. But hopefully, the musicians now can feel as if they have a voice, some degree of agency over their own situation. I wouldn’t want to be at the next board meeting, though.