Category talk:New York City Ballet repertory

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This category was nominated for deletion on 11 January 2008. The result of the discussion was no consensus.

Cross posted from Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2008 January 11[edit]

Category:New York City Ballet Repertory[edit]

The following discussion is an archived debate regarding the category or categories above. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the discussion was no consensus. Kbdank71 16:09, 22 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Nominator's rationale: Delete - category is capturing ballets performed by a particular dance company and people associated with the company. The latter is improper overcategorization. The former is as well, with the added problem that since ballets can be performed by any number of companies and categorizing them in that fashion will lead to massive category clutter. Otto4711 (talk) 18:51, 11 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

- See also:

1.6 Category:American Ballet Theatre dancers

1.13 Category:Ballets Russes choreographers

which also concers Category:Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo choreographers

1.15 Category:New York City Ballet dancers

NYCB Repertory is a special case. City Ballet has the largest rep. of any ballet company in the world, over 400 ballets in all, and dances approx. 80 per year. This is literally ten times as many ballets as most other companies. Further, most of their ballets are only danced by other companies with the permission and under the supervision of the affiliated Balanchine Trust. Robert Greer (talk) 12:50, 12 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

- There may not even be a WP article for some of those ballets, so a linked list would be much more useful I think. Listify and delete.-choster (talk) 16:04, 12 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

List of New York City Ballet repertory already exists. Otto4711 (talk) 00:59, 13 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

- The history of this category and the aforementioned list is as follows: I attend almost every program that City Ballet performs (not every performance, but each of the 12 to 15 "bills" they put up over the course of eight weeks in the winter and spring and in most cases the different casts who dance). Fortunately, there are $15 tickets available for us poor folk. Ballet -- and dance in general -- are not well documented on Wikipedia or elsewhere and are even more ephemeral than theatre, which at least leaves behind a script after closing night. Wikipedia seemed an ideal vehicle to record dance / ballet, to make them a little less ephemeral. I began by creating the list of New York City Ballet rep. and articles for some of the individual ballets and engaged in longish discussions with more experienced Wiki. users including admins. on the best way to do so. NYCB dances so many ballets -- over 400 -- there will be that many eventually, though it will take five years before they cycle through their rep. -- that they would overload any category in which they were deposited. One often sees tags that a category has become ungainly and needs to be broken into subcategories, so I created this category to nip that problem in the bud. I also created categories for NYCB dancers, ABT dancers, Category:Ballets Russes choreographers, Category:Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo choreographers etc. If these be deemed a foolish consistency I ask only that whoever it is that decides to remove them move their entries to their related über category: New York City Ballet dancers to Category:New York City Ballet; American Ballet Theatre dancers to Category:American Ballet Theatre;Ballets Russes choreographers to Category:Ballets Russes;Ballet Russe de Monte Carlochoreographers to Category:Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo etc. NB These last two are seperate entities for entirely different ballet companies! Robert Greer (talk) 11:16, 13 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

PS There is an article for every entry in the category. It is not possible as far as I know to create an entry in a category for an article that does not exist. There are red links for many of the ballets in the list because it will take five years for City Ballet to dance some 400 ballets! Robert Greer (talk) 11:16, 13 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - I have taken the liberty of reformatting your comments somewhat more conventionally. Breaking them up as you had been can lead to comments getting mixed up together (as happened in a discussion up the page; I've unscrambled it). Otto4711 (talk) 15:39, 13 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Keep Useful and appropriate category. Ballets are generally written for particular companies, and are known to be so by those who are interested. We may even need subcategories--perhaps by decade? There will be a WP article for every important work of classical arts, if enough people work on them--and being performed by a company such as this is a sufficient proof of notability for every one of them. Otto, we don't delete categories because they are fairly small art first,17:47, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Thank you, I am familiar with the standards for small categories and indeed made no suggestion that this category be deleted on the basis of its size. Nor have I made any suggestion about the notability of any particular article within the category. The problem is that even if a particular ballet is initially written for a particular company, there is no theoretical limit on the number of companies that can then perform the work. Currently there are over 80 companies listed in Category:Ballet companies and every one of them that's currently active could perform any of the ballets in this category. 80+ categories on the basis of what company performed them is untenable. Any significant number of by-compnay categories is untenable. Otto4711 (talk) 18:23, 13 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

- It is NOT the case that '... there is no theoretical limit on the number of companies that can then perform the work.'

Ballets are subject to copyright. In the case of City Ballet, George Balanchine, and Jerome Robbins they are very tightly controlled by the Balanchine and Robbins trusts, which license them to other companies on a case by case basis (and often decline to do so despite the foregone royalties) and only then with the stipulation that a repetiteur (of which there are about a dozen in the case of Balanchine and who in most cases originated one of the roles and in any case danced the ballet and knows all the roles and their interpretation) be brought in to teach the ballet to the company (likewise Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris, etc.) There are approximately five companies in the U.S. that dance a significant number of Balanchine's ballets, all of which are led by former City Ballet dancers who danced for "Mr. B." You might argue that this a a practical limit, not a theoritical one, but this is a practical world, not a theoritical one, and there is nothing theoretical about the mode of production of ballet (which I love) or theatre (of which I am a practitioner). I should hope that Wikipedia would reflect our all too practical world, not a -- perhaps better! -- theorical one. Finally, given how few people write about ballet (or modern dance) on Wikipedia, there will 'never' be "any significant number of by-compnay categories." Robert Greer (talk) 11:17, 14 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

And ballet companies never license other companies to perform their ballets? Otto4711 (talk) 14:25, 14 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Keep - As with other similar nominations we are dealing with companies with some stability of membership, not with single perfomances or an ephemeral cast for a stage show, whcih dispersed as soon as the show closes. Peterkingiron (talk) 23:09, 13 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The cast of a film is completely stable and we do not categorize on that basis. This is a category for ballets, not dancers, so your cookie-cutter argument about the supposed stability of a dance troupe doesn't apply. Otto4711 (talk) 14:25, 14 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Each film is a unique event with a production period measured in months and a cast that will probably never work together again. A ballet company has 10 to 30 principal dancers and perhaps half that many soloists, most of whom willspend their entire careers in the same company, typically having risen from apprentice to corps de ballet to soloist to principal. The company will dance from 10 to 50 ballets (with the exception of New York City Ballet which dances over 400) and the same dancer will dance these ballets with the same partner over the course of a decade or two (a partner's retirement being a traumatic event, especially to a ballerina if it is the danseur who retires). This is what "mode of production" refers to in my comment on NYCB rep. And ballet dancers have no more in common with film actors than with baseball players. Robert Greer (talk) 12:04, 15 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Well, once again you're just copying and pasting your response from one CFD to another. Sometimes that works, in this case it doesn't because this is a category for ballets, not dancers, so your defense of a dancer category (which remains flawed for those categories) really makes no sense in relation to a ballets category. Otto4711 (talk) 05:19, 17 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Delete Since this category essentially relies on some ballet companies being more notable than others, where does that stop? It is really rather subjective and time-sensitive advertising material anyway, since the mere presence of something in repertoire is not a guarantee that it will be performed any time soon or even ever again. A more accurate categorization would be to note which ones were actually performed; but then again there's the super-notability question again. One could also record, on the same principle, each time a symphony or other orchestral work is performed, and by whom-- especially since the variation in notability of orchestras is surely not so extreme-- there must be at least ten orchestras in the USA alone whose schedules could be so encoded. And as the stated repertoire changes, are we going to add "former repertoire" categories? Mangoe (talk) 05:39, 20 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the category's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this section.

End of cross posting[edit]