From the Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Kerry Sopher at Brigham Young University comes clean about his love for ballet and how he employs it in his lectures. This self-taught dancer uses ballet moves to illustrate diplomatic relations throughout history.

“…the glaring flaws of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies dissected with the help of a series of deftly executed entrechats…a re-creation of the tension surrounding the Bay of Pigs crisis by remaining en pointe for as long as possible (20 seconds on a good day!)… To the strains of Stravinsky’s joyfully martial Rite of Spring, I performed an athletic, 15-minute-long, tightly choreographed celebration of the war on terrorism…I found this performance to be so emotionally and physically exhausting that I was forced to end the class 30 minutes early, right there on that high note.”

It is an interesting story in its own right and an a fairly novel approach to integrating the arts into other subjects. I have never been a real big fan of interpretive dance, but I have to admit that the moves he applies to the various historical occurrences seem appropriate. (Especially his pas de deux with a nervous student to illustrate Anwar el-Sadat’s suspicions of Menachem Begin.)

I also have to empathize with him over his mortification at being snickered at the first time he used dance to illustrate his point in class. To have had the guts to do it in the first place, much less to screw his courage to continue after the laughter from the back of the room is commendable.

I actually went to Ratemyprofessor.com to check him out and see if any students had any comments about the dancing. From the ratings you can’t tell he is anything but a real good teacher. That is probably as it should be. His use of dance is as a illustrative tool to help students learn and not some out of context indulgence or eccentricity.

A little bit of incredulous griping today.

With all the discussions and advice we get about keeping our organizations relevant in our communities, refining our marketing approaches to be more efficient and using technology to meet the expectations of our customers, I often wonder if Tams Witmark Music Library either doesn’t get it or is just complacent from their success.

The company administers the rights to some of the biggest classics in musical theatre. They send out a catalog every year and I am amazed at how unappealing it makes their shows look. Most of the photos are from the original Broadway productions back in the 1960s and 70s.

Yes, it is nice to see what Julie Andrews looked like in her late 20s when she was in Camelot. But the dated costumes and hairstyles just scream “this is staid show with nothing to offer your audiences in 2006” every time I get the catalogue in the mail. I have seen and been a part of these shows and it makes me cringe when I think that people will be turned off from producing them because of these godawful pictures.

The only saving grace I see is that they don’t have these awful pictures on the website. (There are almost no pictures at all.) So between Broadway revivals and seeing/participating in productions, people will have a positive enough impression of the shows that they don’t need images to help them make a choice when they visit the website.

I am sure the catalog works for the company just fine but I wonder if business might increase if they solicited images from even good amateur productions with which to update their catalog.

One thing that is depressing is that the catalog is that by putting in pictures of the original casts, the publication bears witness to the fact that there have been so few great original musicals produced in the last few decades.

Berlin’s Deutsche Oper decision to cancel Mozart’s opera Idomeneo because it may enrage Muslims has gotten me to thinking about the implications.

Artists have often skirted controversy and many venues have cancelled performance under public pressure. These things are not new. Likewise, artists have frequently come under death threats as have the audiences who attend the works. Back in the late 80s/early 90s I had to go through a metal detector and a pat down because a production featuring Vanessa Redgrave had received bomb threats in response to her views on Palestine.

While you should never be in danger of being slain by someone at anytime in your life, as an artist or attendee, you recognized the threat to yourself by others by advancing ideas or choosing to be present at a performance. Just as your car should never be subject to damage, you recognize by driving during rush hour someone may hit you intentionally out of road rage.

What concerns me is that people will harm oblivious, uninvolved individuals within 10 miles of them for something occuring 3000 miles away. The opera is, of course, worried about problems locally because Germany has many guest workers from Islamic countries. Their decision is being made in the context of the violence and slaying for from Rome in response to the pope’s recent comments about Islam. I am afraid people will see the effectiveness of the ploy in cowing people and use the threat as a means of shutting down something they have never seen but have heard enough about to get whipped into a frenzy over.

For example someone in California upon hearing that the Vagina Monologues promote a lesbian lifestyle and is the primary instrument by which young girls are brainwashed into a homosexual relationship may decide to blow up a bookstore in a California town selling the script when Oprah announces on her show that she is sponoring a huge production in Chicago.

The fact that people thousands of miles away who probably have no knowledge of or opinion on a show could be endangered is frightening. The idea that artistic choices one makes might need to be altered out of concern for people half the world away from a production gives one a lot of pause.

The questions and decisions may start out attached to religious beliefs but there is nothing to stop people from employing the tactic with economic and ecologic ones. If you don’t back down to pressure now, you may rob the tactic as a viable tool for the future but end up shouldering the blame for injury and death for people today.

The argument that if we can put a man on the moon why can’t we X is a logical disconnect because all that proves is that a different group of people possessing different skillsets were able to solve a different problem.

So too will people probably discover that what worked to influence decisions globally for a different group for a short time (because I think people will eventually become inured to the threats) won’t be effective for them in another arena.

But it won’t stop them from trying and people most likely will be hurt in the process of discovering how ineffective the tactic might be.