It seems our little piece slapping Scottish Ballet around has ruffled a few feathers, including those of one of the dancers involved, with the good folks in dance coming down on both sides of the argument for and against using your dancers as stooges to raise useless sums of money.
CriticalDance.com, a website that should really be called “not at all critical of dance in any way.com” was stirred from its slumber and summoned up four pages of back and forth on the subject. Albeit with our own press flack Michelle leading the charge by suggesting the whole ‘cash for access’ thing was a bit suspect.
The consensus from the pro ‘cash for access’ lobby was that if the dancers were OK with it then what’s the problem? Which leads us to ask this question:
Scottish Ballet’s auction raised about 14p for the company so no great loss if the whole thing falls apart. But what if somebody was willing to hand over £25,000 for a nice evening with a dancer (man or woman) but a couple of hours before the ‘date’ is to take place the dancer gets cold feet and tells the company they won’t do it? The winner of the auction complains and says they don’t want an alternate ‘date’ and demands their £25,000 back.
The company’s bean counters will be slightly annoyed at losing so much loot and what repercussions can the dancer expect for being the cause of that loss?
It’s a rhetorical question of course because nothing approaching the truth will ever come from the administrators of any ballet company we know of.
Probably the only good thing to come out of this was the fact there was at least some debate, a bit of back and forth from the normally placid online dance community, such as it is. At least we can be thankful for that, probably!
Incidentally, one of the dancers involved in the Scottish Ballet auction, Jarkko Lehmus, has a weblog at Ballet.co.uk. Upon learning of our reporting on this nonsense he replied, on his blog, that he would like to urinate on our editor and have him “suck on his fat one”. All we can say to the lucky soul who won that auction is “SCORE!”