Television: Ballet on DWTS

[Momof3darlings]

No link to share yet, but set your DVRs: Boston Ballet principal Lorna Feijóo will appear on ABC's Dancing With The Stars tomorrow night at 9pm with sister Lorena Feijóo of San Francisco Ballet and Jose Manuel Carreño of American Ballet Theatre! Save the date and set the DVR!

[Victoria Leigh]

Yay! Thank you for that heads up, Momof3. I will be watching!

[Victoria Leigh]

Okay, I'm surprised there are no comments here so far, but I will just say that I was hugely disappointed. Not at all what I expected. Not going to go any further than that or I would go on a rant.

[Momof3darlings]

I feel the same way, I just didn't feel comfortable being the first person to say so. My issue was not the dancers but what the dancers were made to do. There were so many other ways that those 3 dancers could have been showcased and a re-choreographed (or lack thereof) of Swan Lake was not the way to go. We just witnessed the downside of having Hollywood focus on the movie and expect that if you have ballet to share, it will be movie related.

[Victoria Leigh]

Exactly. Very frustrating, and with 3 dancers of that caliber to work with one would certainly hope for something a lot better. I never heard them say where the corps dancers, who were also very nice dancers, were from. Did they say, or just totally ignore them like they didn't exist?

[2kids2]

I felt what was presented was well performed and extremely well recieved by the audience. Yes, it was cliche...It's Hollywood! Much better then some other Hollywood representations (eg: Glee) The more quality art is presented the more it can bring audience members into the theaters.

[balletdaughter]

We were wondering about the corps dancers, as well. As far as we heard, they never acknowledged them in any way (though I admit that we stopped watching after the ballet performance so perhaps they said something eventually).

[Victoria Leigh]

I'm afraid that I can't see any quality to that work that would bring new audiences to ballet. That is why I was so upset with it. They had excellent dancers to work with, but whoever put that together, inlcuding the chopped up music, should be tarred and feathered. No pun intended. Well, maybe it was.

[Sugarflake]

Very interesting on DWTS. I am assuming that they chose Swan Lake because of the movie, but we (DD and I) were so disappointed. The fog was too much and the stage too small for all the corps. Why didn't the male dancer have tights on? The dancing ladies on that show are practically naked, and tights for the male was too much? If you didn't know ballet, that was a very hard excerpt to really enjoy. We wished there was a better representation of ballet last night. Oh well.

[LauraR]

Is this part of a trend to capitalize on the movie to bring audiences to the ballet, as 2kids2 stated? I'm hoping that I'm not veering off topic, but our company is putting on a contemporary swan production next season plus a vampire production that seems to be taking some classics and adding a Hollywood twist to grab some younger audience members. All I can think of is Black Swan and Twilight on stage, sort of like Twilight on Ice. eh.

[Victoria Leigh]

It may be an attempt to do that, but it fell flat, IMO. That is putting it nicely. And personally, I do not feel that taking a classic and doing something like that to it to attract younger audiences is NOT the way to go.

[gav]

...but whoever put that together, inlcuding the chopped up music, should be tarred and feathered. No pun intended. Well, maybe it was.

 

I hope that pun was intended, because it was a good one!

 

I checked out the performance on YouTube this morning. I wasn't as offended by it as some of you, but I hadn't been eagerly anticipating it and wasn't looking at it as an ballet-audience-builder. I did find it rushed, cramped and... uninteresting.

[caliope]

gav

 

What search term did you use? All I can find is an older Tiler Peck appearance.

[gav]

I searched "ballet dwts" and then sorted by date to pull the most recent videos to the top.

[caliope]

Okay thanks. I was looking right at it. It's titled "Macy's Stars of Dance" and I didn't realize that it was DWTS.

I found it very boring and uninteresting - but I think that the average DWTS audience member who doesn't know ballet (or other any other form of dance, really) might enjoy it.