George Balanchine and the Trust

Everyone loves youtube. In fact, dancers and dance lovers abound, all go to youtube, or dailymotion, or vimeo, etc. to see beautiful dancers from companies world wide. All these video sites are great for marketing either dancers themselves, or companies seasons, a lot of companies put up clips of their dancers in rehearsal and on stage in performance.

I am a dancer, and I love this. I love watching rehearsal footage, and performance clips. I think youtube is a great place to watch beautiful dancers from Kirov, Royal Ballet, etc. However, this is where real copyright infringement begins. Youtube members in particular, get very perturbed when posted videos containing Balanchine material get taken down because of violating rights owned by the trust.

There is a great debate that is on-going about Balanchine choreography being removed from youtube. It happens with some frequency. And most likely, if you are a Balanchine lover, you have posted or watched a Balanchine video that will within that same week be removed by the Balanchine Trust.
It is upsetting, because I love Balanchine too, I love watching it - it is one of the most brilliant things. People get really upset though about the clips that the Balanchine Trust removes. What they don't understand however is why they do this.
It is all about protecting Balanchine's integrity. There is a process that is applied to the trust. A lot of people don't even know what the Trust does. It is really designated to protect Balanchine and the genius that he is.

The trust is designed to "preserving and protecting Balanchine's creative works... the Trust has the responsibility of disseminating and protecting the integrity and the copyrights of George Balanchine's work in the present and for the future."

Balanchine is an artist, he has hundreds of ballets that the trust owns the rights to. The trust then can license these ballets out to companies. The companies have to go through a review process with a review committee/board to make sure that their dancers are capable of handling the technical challenges of Balanchine, and then if they get approved, they can buy the license, stage the ballet, and then perform it!

Balanchine, just like any other artist, has copyrighted material, and it is not yet in the public domain, it is protected. And any artist would say that they would want their works protected from being stolen, or used in a disingenuous way. That is what the trust tries to prevent. They don't want Balanchine's Jewels, for example, to get taken and staged improperly - they want everything to remain as authentic as possible to the time of creation. Only so that people can still be able to experience it years from now and it wont have changed.

Wouldn't you want to be able to see Jewels performed the same as it was when Suzanne Farrell, Violet Verdy, and Mimi Paul danced it? I think the trust is not trying to take things off of youtube for the sake of doing so, but preventing people's attempts at re-staging Balanchine ballets without having respect for keeping them true to Balanchine's initial intent. It is preservation. Not to mention the fact that it wouldn't be fair to the companies that pay to have the licenses and the authentic choreography.

The trust utilizes all the license money, by the way, for Balanchine exposure and education purposes. The argument that not allowing Balanchine on youtube is hindering his exposure is not the case, because he is being learned about. There is a lot of educational and exposure opportunities available that are created by the trust.

Lastly, there are places you can go to watch Balanchine choreography. In fact, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, near Lincoln Center has almost all of his choreography on some sort of video or DVD, so there are ways to see it if you want to. There are ways out there, but youtube seems to be the most convenient.

The real problem with letting people intersperse Balanchine with their "'Aunt Jackie' or 'Chicken Noodle Soup' routines--or the ballet equivalent" is that it wouldn't be Balanchine. It wouldn't show the complete thoughtfulness and brilliance that a Balanchine ballet itself would bring to the stage.