Inside the O2

Romeo & Juliet

The hundreds of people who've left the North Greenwich Tube Station are walking to the same place. The rain outside is nearly invisible by sight or touch, except for the droplets that present themselves on my camera. I'm one in the crowd of I don't know how many (I've always been bad with numbers) who are walking — slowly — to the entrance of the O2 arena. I see concrete and gargantuan box-like buildings, whose upstairs contents are mystery. On ground-level they reveal a plethora of eateries — Pret, Cafe Rouge, a Mexican restaurant must have cultivated a level of authenticity while you're inside, but from where I stand it all feels synthetic. I think I should be in an alternate universe, but I'm really down the road from the Prime Meridian. Greenwich is Shakespeare country.

Inside the O2, people have joined an optional queue for metal detecting and baggage scanning. Vendors in yellow jackets are selling special edition Romeo & Juliet programs for 10 pounds each. A handsome, elderly couple is dressed in tweed and trousers — understatedly elegant his and hers. A group of 30-year-old women wear kitten heels and skirts to the knee or chubby calves. A tanned and bleach-blonde 20-something holds tightly to the man next to her. I wonder if his biceps will rip through his tight, white t-shirt. Her black, figure-hugging dress does little for her figure and reveals a bit too much. Clearly the venue — known for Lady Gaga concerts and Monster Truck rallies — has elicited confusion regarding dress.

What the performance looked like:

The performance should have been about what's on stage, but instead I was watching anything but the ballet that was happening in front of me. I tried really hard to resist, but the three gargantuan screens grabbed my attention. They had a way of sucking me into watching the performance on Omega-Vision. A scene would go by, and I would realize I hadn't watched the dancing on stage at all. Also, the pit orchestra was above the screens, and attached to some serious technology that surround-sounded the shit of them. Watching the screens while hearing live sound helped tremendously by speakers made the actual, real, 3-dimensional dancing supplemental. It was surreal to think that the performance on stage was like a lip-synced version of what I was watching on a screen.

Questions:

How does this really open up ballet to a broader audience?

What was the real intention?

If you’re supposedly opening the ballet to a broader audience, why are the tickets more expensive? Why is the O2 a more attractive venue than the Royal Opera House?

Events at O2 Arena

I thought it would be helpful to look at the schedule of events that surround Romeo & Juliet at O2 Arena. And the schedule of events that are on at the Royal Opera House.

Visual comparisons

ROH

O2

Questions for Review of Romeo & Juliet

1. Does the Royal Ballet's performance of Romeo & Juliet in the O2 arena work?

By 'work' I don't mean how well Carlos Acosta performed Romeo. I mean how well does the experience of watching ballet in the arena work?

2. Does ballet in an arena work?

3. What is gained by having a ballet in O2?

Larger audience, cheaper tickets, experimentation with film while dancers are on-stage. Addition of films that will be played on screens during performance.

4. What is lost by having a ballet in O2?

An opera house atmosphere. What is an opera house atmosphere? Thinking about your outfit for at least a few hours before the performance. It's the red-velvet seats and the pit orchestra. Drinking champagne in the glassy, greenhousy Paul Hamlyn Bar. The soft carpet that gives way under your feet as you walk up the stairs to the balcony section. The curtains. The gold and casts of Grecian-looking scenery. The tiny little lamps that outline each section. The steepness of the theater. The tightly packed, sardine-ness of the seats.

Also, seeing the ballet might be lost. You might not actually be able to see the ballet, while even in from standing at the back of the ampitheater level at ROH, you can still see the performance.

Chat with Jennifer Homans

I spoke with Jennifer Homans today. Turns out I didn't need to ask her any questions. What I really needed was for her to listen to what I've been doing and provide a bit of insight.

She got pretty excited about the idea of visualizing a review. She also said it's going to be really difficult. Here are things I should keep in mind:

1. Seriously think about what the pointe shoes add to your story. Are the pointe shoes a subject for reportage? How can they work within the review format. How will they further my opinion?

2. What is my opinion? I need to decide what I want this review to say. I need to figure out the review can visualize my opinion. Right now, my question isn't about how well the dancers dance the roles. My question for this review is: Does this performance work in an arena?

3. Jennifer said that this question should work like a mini thesis question throughout the film. "You will need a really clear outline that moves to a central point, just like writing," she said.

4. To figure out what I want to visualize, maybe I should write a review first, and use that as my working outline.

5. She stressed how important it will be to clarify my ideas: "What you leave out is as important as what you include." Again, what is my argument?

6. Jennifer also said to make sure you make the distinction between being a critic and being a journalist. What would interviews add to my review? Maybe I should be answering the questions I want to ask others.

Revised Proposal

Question: How can ballet be reviewed differently?

Critique and Objectives: My objective with the final major project is to determine if there is a captivating way to review ballet beyond the written word. The standard ballet reviews that you see on daily news sites (The Guardian, The Telegraph, The New York Times) are not contemporary reflections of what the art is doing. Ballet is a visual, multi-sensory experience, traditionally done without words. Currently, critics use the space they have to re-tell what has happened rather than to suggest what the performance means in the scope of a larger stage. I think that the review of a performance can be a timely way in to talk about larger issues. And by doing this, I think that a review of a fleeting moment can have more permanence.

Authorial Position/Tone/Style — My background in the performing arts (as a ballet dancer and cellist) impacts what I choose to write about. Additionally, my understanding of design writing impacts how I choose to approach the visual outcome of my final major project. I don’t want to emulate the dance critics I’ve researched, but I also want to approach ballet reviewing in a way that would engage their current audiences and draw attention from other sections within the news source. For me, design writing is a toolkit that enables me to address problems and link a variety of ideas in ballet by approaching the review from a visual and more technologically focused angle than current ballet reviews. My tone for the written report will be reflective and self-critical. While the tone will not be conversational, I want the report to be a compelling narrative in itself. In the report, I will reflect on reviewing ballet through the lens of design writing.

Context of where this fits into the field — Ballets can sell out before the performance run even begins. The readership in a dance section is bigger than the capacity of the Royal Opera House, yet the review is doing little more than telling us what most of us didn’t see. So my question becomes who is this review for? This is a question I keep asking, especially since dance sections are literally invisible (Dance is buried within the Stage section of The Guardian, and it’s missing from the arts section links on the New York Times front page). It seems that news sources are aware that there isn’t a competitive readership. Still, ballet is changing and it’s becoming more popular in other places — science, fashion, film. But the review isn’t changing to include the new audience that’s taken interest, and it’s not changing to reflect or critique how the artform itself is evolving.

The issues that ballet faces — authorship, tradition, process, education, copyright and visual storytelling — are all big ideas within design and design writing. Neither areas have a strong written history or tradition. Design writing is relatively new. Ballet largely relies on its oral tradition. Juxtaposing these two fields is an experiment to see how they might enrich each other. In my attempt to refresh ballet coverage, I will employ technology and methods of multi-sensorial documentation, such as photography, film, Q&As and captured sound to see if ballet can be reviewed in a way that is truer to the art itself.

Literature/Practice Review:

Interviews with dance critics, design writers; Readings of dance reviews and other arts reviews; Barthes’ Image-Music-Text and Reception Theory; Sarah Rothenbuerg’s “Measuring the Immeasurable.”

Method/Methodology

Methodology	Methodology	Methodology
Content analysis of dance reviews, and video game and music reviews	Interviews with dancers, dance critics and other members of the dance community	Visual Research
Method	Method	Method
Cognitive Analysis	Semi-structured	Research in ballet and dance notation archives

Visual Outcome — This month, for the first time, the Royal Ballet will perform at the O2 Arena. The company's best dancers form a cast that the Royal Opera House hopes will sell-out the four performances scheduled at O2. The arena will hold up to 12,000 audience members per performance (compared to the 2500-seat capacity at the Royal Opera House), and it will give the Royal Ballet the biggest audience it's ever had. With floor seats at 10 pounds a piece, this is ballet for the masses.

Ballet at O2 does have implications. What does it mean for a company with such historical clout to perform in Lady Gaga territory? The financial risk of preparing for this performance is also great — preparing any performance that travels is a major cost — because of the size of the O2 stage, the MacMillan ballet will have to be restaged. The props and scenery must also be reconsidered. There are also many stakeholders in this ballet — RB, ROH, O2 and the 48,000 potential audience members, to name a few.

All of this makes Romeo and Juliet at O2 the perfect place to review ballet in a new way. Through video, photography, found images (from the performance) and recorded interviews, I will review Romeo & Juliet, through the lens of multimedia storytelling, to address the intersection of technology and tradition within ballet. I will tell this story from the point of view of a pointe shoe that travels from the Freed of London pointe shoe workshop, to Covent Garden, to its steps on the stage of the O2 Arena. This is an opportunity to not only review what happens on stage, but to unpick what is happening in the larger sphere of ballet, an art that is rooted in tradition but also pushes the limits of technology. The multimedia mode of reviewing is a way of exploring how criticism can embrace technology (which is what ballet is actually doing well with right now), and move forward with the art it critiques. This review will still form an opinion on the performance I see, but it will also look beyond the one-off performance to explore what this performance means in the long-term. The project will not only address the steps, but also the stakeholders, and what they mean to an art which is rooted in tradition but also continues to push the limits of technology and what a ballet can be.