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Agony & Ecstasy: A Year with English National Ballet

Previously I shared the secret lives of dancers and looked at a year at The Australian Ballet. Recently I discovered a three-part documentary filmed in 2010 by the BBC following the English National Ballet as they stage a production of the most famous ballet, Swan Lake, with a Visa-challenged and therefore missing prima ballerina; address injuries and challenging casting choices for a production of Romeo and Juliet; and lastly, speed towards opening night of their biggest moneymaker, The Nutcracker, with a brand-new, incomplete, let alone ready, production. 

During the 2001-2002 season I worked with American Repertory Ballet, which included doing the marketing and subscription operations for many performances of a brand new The Nutcracker. Watching the third episode of this series brought back vivid memories of the process of staging and selling what is without a doubt the key financial production of any dance company.

In the first episode, we follow the production of Swan Lake at the Royal Albert Hall and its enormous cast of new and experienced dancers longing for recognition. When choreographer Derek Deane puts his reputation on the line by casting a talented but inexperienced young dancer with a world-class guest ballerina, the challenge is on. Derek demands absolute perfection, and all the dancers are under pressure to meet his high standards

We join the company as they fight to finish their most ambitious production of the year - Rudolf Nureyev's Romeo & Juliet. From tensions on stage to challenging rehearsals using real weaponry, the men are performing for their lives. The company are already undermanned so it's crucial that no dancers are injured, but it's only a matter of time before the demanding schedule takes its toll.

The final episode offers a raw and revealing insight into English National Ballet, one of the world's premier ballet companies, at the climax of one of its most demanding years. From injury and pain to success and elation, the series exposes the storm behind the calm of big ballet productions.

Wayne Eagling has a highly demanding job as the artistic director of English National Ballet, looking after the 64 dancers that produce eight ballets a year. He has also decided to put his neck on the line by creating his first full length ballet for the company - The Nutcracker. As the company's crucial and lucrative Christmas production, there is no room for error and Wayne must complete the two hour ballet on an extremely tight schedule.

The film follows the creative processes of a choreographer under pressure and a new production fighting against time. With an important audience of critics, donors and government officials expected on opening night, the show must be finished. But with rehearsals running late and severe snow disrupting the making of the sets, it seems the dancers, costume-makers and technical staff are all fighting for stage time right up until the curtain rises.

The Week's Links: March 29, 2013

All the links posted on social networks this week:

• ​Secrets of the Most Successful College Students ➞
• Harvard Develops Micro-Drones Based On Origami ➞
  
• The Art Of Storytelling Around An App ➞
  
• Study: It's Harder to Tune Out Cell Phone Talkers Than Regular Human Conversations ➞
  
• JWT announces advertising alliance with experimental psychologist ➞
  
• Can computers fill the role of choreographers? ➞
  
• So great recipes here: A World Map of Flavors – 36 Regions, 36 Herb and Spice Combinations ➞
  
• Branded Interactions, or what happens when a gesture becomes synonymous with your app. ➞
  
• Is The Key to Happiness Being Busy? ➞
  
• More on the "Unrealized Promise" of digital textbooks ➞
  
• Colum McCann On The Radical Act Of Storytelling ◉
  
• Useful: Photoshop add-ons you should be using ➞
  
• 'Ballet's Greatest Hits,' with Nigel Lythgoe, coming to cinemas ➞
• The Science of Life, Love and The Sky ◉
  
• Vint Cerf: Actually, the Internet’s going to be just fine ➞
  
• Just Do It & Make It Count ◉
  
• An In-Depth Comparison Between iOS Map Frameworks: Apple MapKit vs. Google Maps SDK ➞
  
• Behind One Of Fashion's Biggest Ideas--The Chanel Jacket ➞
  
• Coming Soon: A Monotype Exhibit Tracing The Roots Of Modern Typography ➞
  
• Useful: Antwort - Responsive Layouts for Email ➞
  
• The Story of Christoph Niemann’s Petting Zoo App- The New Yorker ➞
  
• So great: National Geographic's Cartographic Typefaces. ➞
  
• The Art of Illustrations, Web Comics and 3D Printing ◉
  
• Seven Amazing Wooden Marble Machines by Paul Grundbacher ➞
  
• On Conducting, Motion Capture And The Maestro's Mojo ◉
  
• Brain Researchers Can Detect Who We Are Thinking About ➞
  
• The wonderfully analog tweets of Alton Brown ➞
  
• What a 14-Year-Old Can Teach You About Management ➞
  
• Can anyone turn streaming music into a real business? ➞
  
• A brief history of the Booooo! ➞
  
• A Brief History of Applause ➞
  
• Study: unlock creative thought by zapping left prefrontal cortex ➞
  
• Scientists create formula for perfect parking ➞
  
• 5 smart materials, like inks that conduct electricity ➞
  
• Fascinating: 2,000 Years of Partying - The Brief History and Economics of Spring Break ➞
  
• 10 Ideas That Make A Difference ➞
  
• Creativity Top 5: Week of March 25, 2013 ◉
  
• Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a Typewriter ➞
  
• A Gallery of Stanley Kubrick Cinemagraphs: Iconic Moments Briefly Animated ➞
  
• On Keeping a Notebook in the Digital Age ➞
  
• Inventing Magic Toys, Puzzles And Video Games ◉
  
• Creative Commons Announces “School of Open” with Courses to Focus on Digital Openness ➞
  
• Digital Files and 3D Printing—in the Renaissance? ➞
  
• Start With The Supposition That People Don't Make Sense: David Chang on The Paul Holdengraber ◉
  
• Who Really Invented the Smiley Face? ➞
  
• The Northern Lights—From Scientific Phenomenon to Artists' Muse ➞
  
• Lovely: Fresh Off the 3D Printer - Henry Segerman's Mathematical Sculptures ➞
  
• What Mosh Pits Can Teach Us About Disaster Planning ➞
  
• These Little Robot Bees Could Pollinate the Fields of the Future ➞
  
• Six Centuries Ago, Chinese Explorers Left This Coin Behind in Africa ➞
  
• Coffee: How Different People Serve the World’s Favorite Hot Drink ➞
  
• Ballet 101: Dispelling myths for newcomers and skeptics ➞
  
• Are Piracy, Knock Offs and Minecraft Good For Us? ◉
  
• The Improbable Rise of NPR Music ➞
  
• Reports of the Death of Opera Have Been Greatly Exaggerated ➞
  
• Music of Vivaldi Boosts Mental Vitality ➞
  
• Ze Frank: The Shift From 0 To 1, What Is Creativity? ◉
  
• In Search of Haruki Murakami, Japan’s Great Postmodernist Novelist ➞
  
• The 10 most popular TED-Ed lessons so far ➞
  
• These are so great: Minimalist Video Game Posters ➞
  
• John Maeda & The Art of Leadership ➞
  
• Dave Pell's Tips On Building A Huge Email Newsletter Around Your Project ➞
  
• How much is the internet worth? ➞
  
• Will The New York Times Redesign Lead To A New Web Standard? ➞
  
• Typographica: Our Favorite Typefaces of 2012 ➞
  
• George Lucas announces plans for museum devoted to the story-telling arts ➞
  
• Smithsonian Magazine 2012 Photography Contest: 50 Finalists ➞
  
• Amazing: Gazette collects your RSS feeds into a weekly ebook ➞
  
• Should We Be Sleeping in Shifts, Rather than 7-Hour Blocks? ➞
  
• Computer Arts Magazine On Pure and Simple Logos ➞
  
• Information Is Beautiful visualized the major causes of death in the 20th Century ➞
  
• Daphne Koller Brings the World Into Stanford Classes ➞
  
• 5 Lessons In UI Design, From A Breakthrough Museum ➞
  
• Sleeping less than six hours a night skews activity of hundreds of genes ➞
  
• Useful: Learn CSS Layout ➞
  
• Study: DNA strand length could be indicator of your life span ➞
  
• Marvel announces weekly comic series for mobile devices ➞
  
• Ridley Scott and Machinima partner to create 12 sci-fi shorts ➞
  
• The Photographer Who Made Architects Famous➞
  

Recommended This Week: 

The Science of Life, Love and The Sky

Today we conclude our visit through my favorite PBS Digital Studio offerings, in honor of the one-year anniversary of PBS Idea Channel, with a look at the recently launched It's Okay To Be Smart based on the great blog of the same name. Through the witty episodes we'll learn about the Auroras, why the sky is blue, and lastly, the odds of finding life and love. ​

Space might seem like an empty place, but the area surrounding Earth is constantly being bombarded by waves of charged particles released by the Sun: The solar wind. Luckily, thanks to Earth's swirling, molten core (and the magnetic field it provides), we are protected from this planet-sterilizing onslaught like an invisible force field.

All that science has a beautiful side effect: It makes the auroras! The Northern and Southern lights are the result of the solar wind and its dance with Earth's magnetic field and polar atmosphere. It's Earth's own cosmic light show!

References for this episode.

Why is the sky blue? It's a question that you'd think kids have been asking for thousands of years, but it might not be that old at all. The ancient Greek poet Homer never used a word for blue in The Odyssey or The Iliad, because blue is one of the last colors that cultures pick out a word for.

In this episode, I'll tell you not only why the sky is blue, but why it's red at sunset. It turns out, those colors are all part of the same sunbeam. And when you're looking at a blue sky, you could be sharing a special moment with someone thousands of miles away. Next time a kid (or the kid inside you) wants to know why the sky is blue, you'll have science to back you up!

(We know that the Earth turns the wrong direction in the animation, sorry about that. Something weird happened when we were programming the animation and it got reversed. Or maybe time travel!)

References for this episode.

Love is a complicated combination of brain chemicals and behavior that scientists are only just beginning to figure out. And it's remarkable that in every society that we have looked at on Earth, romantic love exists. So if love is so universal, and there are 7 billion other people out there looking for it, why can it seem like it's so hard to find?

In this episode, we'll look at what we can learn about the search for love from the search for extraterrestrial life. We'll start with Enrico Fermi's paradox of why we haven't been contacted by any extraterrestrials yet, and then at Frank Drake's equation to estimate the number of civilizations that might exist in our galaxy (updated with current numbers). Finally, we'll meet a young lady named Ann and see if we can calculate how many special someones there might be out there for her. It's a cosmic love story!

References for this episode.

Previously on It's Okay To Be Smart.

The Art of Illustrations, Web Comics and 3D Printing

​Continuing the week's look at PBS Digital Studios, today we catch up with PBS Off Book. Last time we took a look at Off Book I shared mini documentaries on creative coding, graphic design and other great explorations. Today we look at illustrations, web comics, 3D printing and competitive gaming. 

​The internet has given birth to yet another new medium: webcomics. Moving beyond the restrictions of print, webcomic artists interact directly with audiences who share their own unique worldview, and create stories that are often embedded in innovative formats only possible online. Sometimes funny, sometimes personal, and almost always weird, web comic creators have taken the comic strip form to new, mature, and artistic heights.

Much attention has been paid to 3D Printing lately, with new companies developing cheaper and more efficient consumer models that have wowed the tech community. They herald 3D Printing as a revolutionary and disruptive technology, but how will these printers truly affect our society? Beyond an initial novelty, 3D Printing could have a game-changing impact on consumer culture, copyright and patent law, and even the very concept of scarcity on which our economy is based. From at-home repairs to new businesses, from medical to ecological developments, 3D Printing has an undeniably wide range of possibilities which could profoundly change our world.

Illustrators articulate what a photograph cannot. Using an array of techniques and styles, illustrators evoke stories and meaning in a variety of mediums, from editorial illustration in magazines and newspapers, to comics books, to activist media. And as their tasks over the years have become less informational and more expressive, their individual voice as artists becomes all the more critical and beautiful, revealing an exciting and awe-inspiring age of illustration.

As games have increased in sophistication, they have become a stage for ever higher displays of human skill and brilliance. The result is a tier of the gaming world filled with startling disciplined, talented, and highly competitive players. Born out of arcade tournaments and LAN parties, the world of competitive gaming is now entering a mature phase, featuring major global events attended by thousands and watched by millions online. With valuable sponsorship and prize money of increasing value, competitive gaming is claiming a space similar to that of traditional sports. This new industry is still in its early stages, developing broadcasting models and negotiating the culture of its widening audience. But whether it's fighting games or MOBAs, the players and spectators are passionate, and individuals and leagues are working hard to elevate e-sports into the highest echelons of human achievement.

 

Previously on Off Book. ​