I’m mostly going to be cross-posting from my Ko-Fi page. Posts will go up there first and be posted here later in the day.
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I’m going to try to regularly blog between now and September about ballet to hopefully share why I love this art so much. I thought the best place to start is where one can see ballet.
Most major cities will have a ballet company. The ballet company tends to be connected to the opera. Tickets are going to be fairly expensive, but it’s worth it for the spectacle. Ballets are set to live music, so you are going to see a live orchestra as well as a ballet. The only exception to this is when there’s traveling company, and this might be a US thing. I have seen ballets at the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago, the Dance Theater of Harlem when they performed in Seattle, Ballet Arizona, and at the Royal Ballet in London.
There are also streaming services. Some larger companies offer certain productions for rent through their websites. In my opinion, the best streaming sites for ballet are the Royal Ballet and MarqueeTV.
The Royal Ballet offers a variety of their past performances to stream as well as behind the scenes videos and interviews with performers.
MarqueeTV offers a variety of performances from different companies. It’s an arts streaming platform so besides ballet there’s some symphonies, theater, and other productions available for viewing. Both are also fairly reasonably priced. I usually stream ballets through these two sites.
I also happened to stumble upon on another site while looking for places for streaming ballets: medici.tv. I haven’t used it, but it looks like a comprehensive streaming site of ballets (as well as operas and symphonies). There are a lot of older classic ballets as well as newer ballets. The most intriguing feature is the variety of different companies offered on this site. If you’re interested in ballet and you have the money, this streaming service might be worth a look.
The other option is physical media, which I realize is not all that common anymore. But if you are library patron, there are still DVDs of ballets that you can request. I know the Royal Ballet has a ton of their productions on physical media. You may be able to find some documentaries and productions through library streaming services as well.
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