The Canned Cleopatra Ballet

Union members from the AFL-CIO, along with AFM members from all over the country collectively waged a dynamic protest against the "Canned Cleopatra Ballet," a production of the Texas Ballet Theater in which the ballet company substituted live music with a taped soundtrack.

The performance in late March 2009 was doomed from the start, as ballet company artistic director Ben Stevenson, O.B.E. traveled to Shanghai in June 2008 to buy a recording from a Chinese government-subsidized orchestra for $30,000. The ballet company played this tape of Rimsky-Korsakov's score at the performance, hoping that audiences and critics would not notice the fraud.

Needless to say, they were wrong, and the production was a failure. The review in the Dallas Morning News called the performance "clumsy" and "hamstrung," and particularly panned the canned soundtrack: "Raw, rough-hewn, taped music barged forward, when a more caressing tempo was needed to mirror the emotions…”

President Ray Hair of Local 72-147 and over 300 musicians carried this powerful message to the ballet company and to the arts community in general: attempting a live ballet performance without live music is a travesty. It violates the creative soul of the performers, limits their artistic abilities and perpetrates a musical and visual fraud upon the paying audience and patrons of the arts.

Professional ballet requires professional musicians. Critics and audiences realize anything less is dishonest.

It's rare that a musicians' strike results in such favorable local press coverage. This should have been disseminated nationally by the AFM's public relations firm, which we paid $116,016 in 2008, but which is only ever employed to announce the feeble achievements of Tom Lee's administration.