A milestone event in the history of the Internet took place last week and Canada’s National Ballet was right there in the thick of it.
Five major international troupes digitally opened their doors to the world in a first-of-its-kind webcast called World Ballet Day.
According to preliminary reports the continuous, 20-hour live-streamed broadcast — the longest ever hosted on YouTube — had more than a third of a million views. That may not seem much compared with viral videos of mooning frat boys or dancing cats, but the figures you see posted for such trivia are cumulative. It remains to be seen how many views the entire World Ballet Day webcast attracted during the 48 hours it remained available for viewing after San Francisco Ballet wrapped up the live stream on Wednesday evening.
Edited highlights of the event will also soon be posted as a permanent record.
Perhaps more telling was the average “dwell time” of 28 minutes. In plain talk, that’s the average time viewers spent watching. Given the seemingly ever-shrinking attention span of contemporary humanity — remember the radio station that wanted to trim the length of pop songs? — it’s a truly remarkable figure.
“It’s almost unheard of,” says Jacob Niedzwiecki, the multi-talented, self-styled “creative technologist” and former dancer who directed World Ballet Day’s Toronto segment. “What it shows is that the art form can translate to this global medium.”
Meanwhile, some million viewers tweeted their comments and questions with the result that World Ballet Day’s overall Twittersphere reach exceeded five million, making it Wednesday’s top-trending topic, higher even than the Ebola outbreak and the troubled Middle East.
It all started at noon Melbourne time (10 p.m. Tuesday in Toronto) as the Australian Ballet led the way with four hours of programming that included the dancers’ daily practice/warm-up class, followed by rehearsals, and complemented by interviews and cutaway segments designed to give viewers a comprehensive fly-on-the-wall look at all the hard work that lies behind the magic audiences see onstage.
With a collective waving of hands and many smiles, the Australians handed off to Moscow where TV presenter Alla Sigalova was waiting to host a perhaps unintentionally revealing look at a day in the life of the hallowed Bolshoi Ballet, at the start of its 239th annual season.
The 240-dancer Moscow troupe is the most internationally renowned part of a state-run institution of some 3,000 employees comprising ballet and opera companies along with more than 150 orchestral musicians, and a small army of technical staff, administrators and support service personnel. It’s a Byzantine organization, notorious for its scandals, most recently the shameful 2013 acid attack on artistic director Sergei Filin, now back in the studio but with his sight severely compromised. There also in the studio was the Bolshoi’s resident choreographer, former long-time artistic director and controversial eminence grise Yuri Grigorovich, 87.
Compared with the happy faces and almost palpable friendliness beaming sunnily from Melbourne, the atmosphere in Moscow seemed decidedly fraught and chilly.
From Moscow, the torch passed to London and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This was the organization whose success with its own dedicated live, eight-hour, day-in-the-life YouTube broadcast in March 2012 prompted a magnanimous decision to produce a global event embracing troupes from around the world.
The goal was to make the whole affair as true to life as possible, which meant selecting companies in geographical locations that would cause little or no disruption to their daily schedules. Given its time zone and artistic stature, the Australia Ballet was a no-brainer. It would have been almost unthinkable not to include Russia. The Royal Ballet, apart from originating the project, is an iconic company. But in terms of who should follow from London there were several eminently eligible candidates besides our National Ballet: New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, also based in New York; Boston Ballet or even Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet.
Yet, the privilege and huge global exposure came to Canada, a reflection of both the National Ballet’s international standing and the warm relations artistic director Karen Kain established with her former counterpart in London, Monica Mason, and has continued with Mason’s successor, Kevin O’Hare.
“We have a wonderful relationship and being included was extraordinary for us,” says Kain. “The staff at the Royal Ballet have huge expertise in this area and were just wonderful in helping us with the technical side of things.”
The National Ballet’s four-hour share of World Ballet Day was not without its curious ironies. This is the company where former Bolshoi star Svetlana Lunkina has now found permanent refuge as a principal dancer. One doubts she rose early to watch the feed from Moscow. And, as timing would have it, former Royal Ballet director Sir Anthony Dowell, whom one might have expected to see in London, coaching dancers in roles he made famous during a long and illustrious stage career at Covent Garden, was seen in the National Ballet’s main studio, preparing principal casts for the company’s November revival of Manon, Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s steamy full-length drama of love, lust, venality and corruption.
“They’re getting it from the horse’s mouth,” quipped the visiting British knight.
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