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The Buzz, 9-23: All the
News that's Fit to Spit
The Gray Lady Blurs the Lines
By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2003 The Dance Insider
These are contrary days
at the New York Times. In its editorial pages, Times columnists,
notably Paul Krugman, have fearlessly criticized the Bush Administration
when it makes things up. But in its reporting of dance news, the
paper has been enabling some bizarre world-views. First, its European
cultural correspondent described William Forsythe as relatively
unknown in the United States. (To non-dance specialist journalists
living abroad, maybe.) Next, it gave irresponsible credence to claims
that the Bolshoi Ballet had fired a ballerina because she was fat.
And this past Saturday, the Times's Jennifer Dunning in effect likened
the Martha Graham Dance Company's fight to retain the rights to
Graham's ballets to the issue of illegal downloading of music.
The lead of Sophia Kishkovsky's
September 17 story on the firing of Bolshoi dancer Anastasia Volochkova,
replete with tired cliches about ballet, was more fitting for a
tabloid than a paper that normally offers some of the most serious
dance criticism in daily journalism:
"One of Russia's best-known
ballerinas and post-communist celebrities was fired today by the
Bolshoi Theater after a war of insults over whether she was fit
for a pas de deux.... Theater officials are charging the ballerina,
Anastasia Volochkova, with one of ballet's deadly sins: they say
she has become too fat."
To support this contention,
Kishkovsky cites a Bolshoi publicist, Katerina Novikova, as saying,
"She is heavy for a ballerina; she is hard to lift." The ballerina,
says the reporter, responded by speaking of "mysterious forces working
against her -- she wouldn't identify them -- and also said theater
administrators, working on behalf of those forces, did not like
her and had plotted to push her out."
The reporter does cite
Volochkova and others as saying weight or height should not be an
issue in ballet, but the writer ignores these arguments by persuading
the dancer to allow the New York Times to measure her, supposedly
with a view towards finding out whether she is, in fact, of an "unwieldy"
height.
Kishkovsky's story is
misleading on the case in hand and, in the larger picture, potentially
hazardous to the health of young dancers.
According to Bolshoi
insiders, the dispute between Volochkova and the Bolshoi does in
fact boil down to a personality dispute. The Times allows for that
possibility, certainly, but it's not the way the story is framed.
Volochkova stands accused of the "deadly sin" of being too fat to
dance, and the rest of the story is built around that contention.
Meanwhile, at least one important detail that supports the political
basis of the firing is left out. While noting that the dancer was
offered a contract extension through December 31, the paper neglects
to mention that this would be one day before the Bolshoi's new artistic
director, Alexei Ratmansky, starts work.
By enabling the Bolshoi's
(alleged) point of view that Volochkova was in fact fired because
she was "too fat" -- it's even inferred that one of her partners
was hospitalized after dancing with her -- the Times will no doubt
help produce a new generation of young dancers who think they must
starve themselves in order to win and maintain a job in dance. (At
presstime, Novikova had not responded to a Dance Insider request
to confirm her comments to the Times.)
It's no secret to dancers that the Times has for many years enabled
Ron Protas's fantasies that he owns the work of Martha Graham. Ever
since Protas took the Martha Graham Center to court three years
ago, in a losing battle to wrest Martha's name, technique, and ballets
from her school and company, the Times has extended that support
to enabling Protas's legal spin on his claim: This is not about
one non-dancer attempting to usurp the rights of Graham dancers
to perform the work that's in their bodies -- it's about trying
to deprive choreographers of the right to their ownwork!
I guess even the Times's
editors must have gotten tired of that spin -- or maybe they read
Federal District Court Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum's opinion in favor of the Center
and were disabused of it -- because now the Times dance writers
are trying a new spin on Protas's spin: The fight over Graham's
works is just like the debate over online music piracy!
This, anyway, was Jennifer
Dunning's premise for giving Protas another day in the court of
public opinion, albeit with the same old arguments. Here's the lead
to Saturday's story:
"Contentious debates
over artistic ownership generally seem to revolve around online
music piracy or Mickey Mouse. But dance is facing unexpected and
vexing questions about artists' rights as well. Do choreographers
own their dances? Or are they simply employees who give up ownership
to organizations that commission or support their work?" She continues:
"As dance moves out of studio and into the world of corporate support,
such issues have become more urgent.... Stories of musicians and
writers losing the rights -- and the royalties -- to their work
are familiar. But the problem has not really cropped up in dance
until recently."
In point of fact, the
Graham Center to which Cedarbaum awarded the rights to the work
a year ago was not just a commissioner of the ballets or a "supporter"
of Graham; it was the not-for-profit entity she set up so that she
could afford to continue to create the work. The Times has been
spinning the case as a fight over choreographers' rights to their
work for a long time. One might have thought the paper would shut
up, even if Protas (who has appealed) won't, after reading the judge's
soundly reasoned opinion, which was based on the specifics of this
case, not on a re-thinking of authors' rights to their works. In
a word, Graham (as, to be fair, Dunning notes towards the end of
her story) sold her school to the not-for-profit entity that would
become the Graham Center, in return for which she got a salary and
the Graham organization the not-for-profit status and tax exemptions
that came with it.
But no, the Times has
used every opportunity, not excluding reviews, to raise the spectre
of the loss of choreographers' rights portended by the Graham victory.
So what's the excuse
for regurgitating this tired old claim once again? "In the latest
twist," writes Dunning, "several prominent names in dance and theater
have joined the grueling legal battle over the rights to Martha
Graham's name and work, which has once again spurred a lively debate
over a dancer's artistic legacy."
In the mind of Ron Protas
and the pages of the Times, maybe, but Dunning's supporting material
is weak.
There may well be "several"
"names" who have filed fr briefings in support of Protas's appeal
of Judge Cedarbaum's ruling, but Dunning mentions just three: Theater
director Gordon Davidson, Joffrey Ballet of Chicago director Gerald
Arpino, and American Dance Festival director Charles Reinhart.
If Reinhart's right
to speak as an elder statesman on dance issues is unquestionable,
his objectivity on this particular issue is not. In sharing Reinhart's
remarks favorable to Protas's claim, what Dunning leaves out is
that when the Graham company suspended operations in 2000, it had
to withdraw from the ADF, a few days before it was scheduled to
open the season. Reinhart certainly had a right to be miffed, and
maybe even the right to approach the dancers and Protas separately
to try to save the season. (The dancers refused to work under Protas.)
And his opinion supporting Protas's claim might not be influenced
by this history. But Dunning's readers had a right to know that
as concerns the Graham company, Charles Reinhart is not necessarily
a neutral party. (The company has not been invited back to ADF since.)
Dunning also quotes
Reinhart -- and it's a familiar refrain to Times readers -- as saying,
"The whole structure of the Martha Graham Dance Company and its
legal entities was to support Martha, not the other way around."
I asked Graham executive
director Marvin Preston about this point. "It is not the case that
the citizens of the State of New York created a structure to support
Martha Graham," Preston began, referring to the not-for-profit organization
set up at Graham's behest in 1956, initially for her school. "It
is the case that the legislators of the State of New York created
a bunch of tax exemptions and incentives to apply to organizations
that wished to conform to the requirements of qualifying for the
benefits flowing therefrom. The benefits include an exemption from
taxation on income, possible exemption from the payment of sales
taxes, providing tax deductions to American tax filers who make
and disclose contributions to qualifying not for profit organizations,"
and others. "The requirements are fairly simple: The organization
must have as its raison d'etre a purpose that the government finds
beneficial to the citizenry and worthy of receiving the benefits
described."
In other words, the
state had made an investment in the work, by granting Graham's Center
a not-for-profit status that, among other things, exempted it from
certain taxes. (Dunning does excerpt a letter from Graham to her
mother in which she explains how the not-for-profit status will
make her life easier.) Thus Graham's ownership of the works -- and
her right to give them away to Protas -- is called into question
not just because she created many of them as an employee of the
company, but because the state of New York -- the citizens -- were
vested too. That's why New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer
weighed in on the side of the defendant Graham organization.
And speaking of investments,
Reinhart also tells Dunning, "These problems would never have existed
50 years ago, because the concept of a penny being made by a choreographer
or from a dance was unheard of. So now that the commercial aspect
of making money has prevailed in this nonprofit world of dance,
and the valuable asset is the dance itself -- hey, that's a success
story. Now we've got to straighten it out and make sure we keep
that value with the creator, the choreographer."
Dance could certainly
use more commercialism -- better promotion, for one thing -- but
"making money," strictly speaking, is not a question for a not-for-profit
company. "The single key distinction between not-for-profit organizations
and for-profit organizations," explains Preston, is that "not-for-profits
cannot have any shareholders. That's all there is to it. Where a
for-profit organization can make money and reinvest it in operations,
growth, equipment, new business, buildings --anything including
distributing those profits to shareholders in the form of dividends
-- a not-for-profit cannot. All of the gain from operations (if
there is any) must be reused by applying it to the purpose of the
organization. No one is allowed legally to personally benefit from
the existence or operation of a not-for-profit. Period."
(Author's Note: The first headline above borrows exactly from
Bill Sokol.)
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