PLEASE help save the Atlanta Ballet Orchestra (please read)

[Tubadork]

Please consider this all tubenet members,

The Mgt. of the Atlanta Ballet is plannning to go to tape music (yuck!).
Here is an article on the situation:
http://www.accessatlanta.com/news/conte ... allet.html

here is a petition to sign. Please help,
http://www.petitiononline.com/abos8306/petition.html

Bill Pritchard

[cjk]

Can we make this sticky for a while?

[Chuck(G)]

One aspect I'd appreciate discussion of is the necessity of going to canned music.

If the Atlanta Ballet is staring at the likelihood of going dark unless serious cuts are made, I can readily appreciate their predicament. Given a choice between no dancing and canned music, I'll take canned music any day.

[MartyNeilan]

I was signature number 2145 and I used to own a 2145 - how cool is that!

[TubaRay]

I was signature number 2145 and I used to own a 2145 - how cool is that!

I must have missed something.

[windshieldbug]

One aspect I'd appreciate discussion of is the necessity of going to canned music.

The necessity is more patrons and less overhead, not less warm bodies in the pit!

[Chuck(G)]

The necessity is more patrons and less overhead, not less warm bodies in the pit!

I agree--but it's a lot harder to find more paying audience than it is to find warm bodies who have to get paid to fill the pit.

[windshieldbug]

Someone's got to pay the Vincent Price... but somehow, its never the overthat loses its head

[Tubadork]

Bump

[Alex C]

I have some information from my Atlanta connections.

The orchestra members were beginning the bargaining process for a new contract in good faith. One of the committe members had talked to the management one day, the next day an article appeared in the newspaper much like the one linked to.

So... the Atlanta Ballet management intentionally deceived the orchestra members into believing that they were going to negotiate a contract. That is bad faith bargaining.

Strike one against the ballet management - for bad faith bargaining.

As the article mentioned, the Atlanta Ballet has a surplus of over $7,000,000. oops didn't mean to let that one slip So rather than find ways to
-1- cut costs (this is where the idea of bargaining comes in) but not only the musicians. Did the stage crew take a cut this year? They're union... or the management. Or the dancers, or the rehearsal pianist, or the guest artists, or the blahblahblah. Probably not, but it's easy to screw the musicians.
-2- encourage donations because less than half their operating budget is through ticket sales
-3- attract a larger audience

So rather than do any of that, they figured a good way to save a measley 7.15% of their current surplus every year was to fire the musicians.

Strike two against the ballet management - for bad management.

The Atlanta Ballet did the same thing about 7 years ago. Oh, hey, did anybody remember that? Yep, they fired the musicians before. The result was a smaller audience which took years to rebuild. Didn't they learn the last time?

Strike three against the ballet management - for stupidity.

I wonder if the general manager got a raise this year? Anybody want to take bets. There's no strike four in baseball, anybody know if there's one if ballet?

So what reason could they have for canning (no pun, no pun... whew) the musicians? Answer might be that the Atlanta Ballet needs new management.

Personally, given the choice, I would rather not see ballet with canned music. I did enough of that when my little girl was taking ballet classes, I already know what it's like. Real music makes ballet palatable... kinda.

I don't have a "union attitude" even though I belong to the AFM. However, this is the kind of thing that forced the need for unions to begin with. As unpopular as unions are now, it shows there is still a need.

And Don's brother, Dave, thought I wasn't paying attention...

I may not have all of the facts down pat, it is second hand information. Maybe there's an Atlanta Ballet musician who can straighten any errors out. He's probably got time for it now.

[Henry Gertcher]

Pardon me for being naive but isn't $7,000,000 a lot of money to blow in the course of a year? What is the operating cost of the company? I just don't see how a company, any company can go from being that much in the black to being in the red in one year with out something shady going on. Any thoughts on to why they lost/spent all that money? Not being a huge fan of ballet or from the area I couldn't hazard a guess other than maybe they threw one hell of a party.

Henry Gertcher

[Tubainsauga]

Just to clarify, their operating budget is $7,000,000, not their surplus.

The ballet's most recent financial filing, for the fiscal year ending July 2005, show it in the black with an annual budget of more than $7 million. This year, however, the ballet is operating at a loss and needs to cut costs in order to stay on track financially, Tatu said.

[Tubadork]

Please sign the petition,
thanks,
Bill

[Slamson]

the solution seems simple to me - why not the keep the live orchestra and run videos of the dancers on a jumbo screen?

[MaryAnn]

A friend of mine play with the travelling Phantom of the Opera show. They went to "partially canned" music a while back, even though the musicians felt it would ruin the show. Didn't matter to management....they found out that the audience didn't even realize there was a live orchestra in the pit anyway, and so it just didn't matter if part of the orchestra was not live. I assume it's a similar thing with the ballet.

If you live in a country that uses the capitalist system, you can't be surprised when the profit motive overrides everything else. (No, I'm not a socialist or a communist....I just find some things about capitalism that I don't like. The arts and medicine are areas where we need a different approach than profit motive.)

MA