Cheap Video Dictionary of Classical Ballet (Video) Price

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Customer Reviews of Video Dictionary of Classical Ballet

The Video Dictionary of Classical Ballet
I was very fond on classic dance all my life long, always I wanted to know the name of the pirouettes or the positions the dancers do. I have read some books, but nothing is enough clear than looking a dancer doing them. The dancer are women and men, the voice in French name the positions, and the details are told in a very clear English language. <
>They are two CDs plenty of informations and examples.

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Good concept, good artistic execution, technical problems.
Viewing this DVD, I wanted to give it an evaluation such as they give in the Olympic Games -- Artistic merit and Technical merit. The dancers are excellent, the voice-over is good, with slow motion and close-up shots being frequent, and (a nice touch) most of the names of the dance movements are read aloud by a native French speaker from the French words written on the screen. <
> So far, so good. If the technical part of the DVD matched, this set would get a 5-star rating from me. As my purpose in buying this DVD was to obtain material for my sculptural work (I am now learning how to sculpt realistic figures and doing ballet dancers, particularly male ones, is my goal)the presence of an excellent male dancer was a great bonus. However the music, while of acceptable tonal quality, cuts out from time to time for short periods and a small amount of the voice-over may be missing. Also there is some problems at a few points with flickering and slight darkening of the screen (some of which seems to disappear upon replaying). I have carefully sat down and watched almost all of the DVD (almost four hours worth split up into half hour or so sessions)to see if I want to keep this DVD or not. As I received this from a third-party vendor (Digital Eyes)which promised no problems with returns and which gave me a good price for it, I am more tolerant than maybe I would be if I paid full price. For my sculptural work, there is more material here than I will probably ever completely use so I will likely keep it provided there are no serious problems with the part remaining to be viewed. Be aware that the copyright is 1983 and I doubt that it has had any "remastering" or other work done on it except for conversion to DVD format. For someone like me with my goals, this was worth buying despite its "dings," however a ballet student might have a different opinion. <
> I realize that this has been a rather long review but I wanted to help others with their decision about this artistically excellent but technically flowed DVD. <
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As Good As It Will Get For A Video Dictionary.
This is an excellent reference work for the ballet student or professional. It is useful for beginners as well as professional dancers. Thank goodness it has come out on dvd. It was very difficult to use on vhs but now it is quite easy and useful. The steps and positions are demonstrated by famous first rate dancers. It is fantastically complete, but keep in mind that ballet terminology is not set in stone and is not always keeping up with modern inovations in ballet(yes, even "classical" ballet is evolving). After a while in this business you realize that a complete standard terminology is not going to happen. What we have here is everthing that you should ever need in the way of terminology and after learning most of what is shown in this dvd, you might figure out how to express something not covered here.