Richard Finkelstein, Detail Man

Richard Finkelstein (our photographer!)
© Renee Renouf (scribe!)

Richard Finkelstein is a high contender for all-time detail manager of important historical details. He also is exceedingly generous of his time and theatrical expertise, a skill whose range impressed me when I spent part of the Sunday June 23 morning at the IBC Office on Pearl Street. Richard was there at his Dell Computer with its staggering battery of software programs manipulating almost two things at once: images I needed and program notes for tonight’s Round Three. The size he produces is 21.5 x 15.5 inches. "That’s the size of the cases, but this machine can produce images that are eight feet in size." An HP giant, he had it shipped directly to Jackson.

I managed to take a digital image of Richard under his direction, using one of his four cameras, and then watched him as he tweaked it, from the microchip he inserted in one of his attachments. Out went a card tacked on portable wall in the background; a cord connecting the computer to the outsized printer which is used for his daily images in the Thalia Mara Auditorium lobby. Marilyn Mill Beach’s image, shot at an awkward angle, was righted, and cropped, to send along to ballet.co.’s website, and incongruent corners were filled in with the proper color resolution. Yea, verily, he’s a technical genie, well past the apprentice stage.

I asked Richard how he got interested in the Competition. Richard prefaced his disclosure by saying that flubs are usually ascribed to something else and quoted a line from Waiting for Godot, ‘Isn’t it like a man to blame on his shoes the shape of his foot?’ as being particularly apt for dancers.

"I was watching the 1982 documentary on the Jackson Competition, "To Dance for Gold" with Jacques D’Amboise as the master of ceremonies. Kathryn Healey, then 13, was competing. She was an ice skating champion as well, and since she was underage, she had to petition to be included.

"Kathryn was included in the Competition, and she was clearly headed for a gold medal when she fell. As she came off stage, D’Amboise asked her, ‘What happened?’ and Healey replied, ‘I fell.’ D’Amboise asked her questions about the lighting and the condition of the marley floor and Healey replied, ‘I fell" to both his comments. I was tongue-tied with admiration, and decided that I must meet her. I didn’t meet her until 1990, but that kind of a response from a 13 year old made me believe that this is a human being who deserves the name of an artist."

Richard’s first competition was 1986. "I noticed errors in the program, spelling, and other inconsistencies. So I wrote Sue Lobrano, the Competition’s Executive Director, and sent her a mock up of how I thought the programs should look. She replied, ‘Okay, you do it.’

"Now the irony of all this is that I really don’t type, but I am in charge of filling in the details. The Russians are notorious for simply writing Mozart in their notes. I add the Wolfgang Amadeus and the Opus number. I’ve added the necessary accents on the names, and there is a consistency in color for the programs of each round which can be carried over from one Competition to another."

Richard’s professional training is in theatre design received at Wilkes College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania where he studied with Klaus Holm. "Klaus is the son of the modern dancer and choreographer Hanya Holm, so that was another inspiration. Klaus had studied with Donald Onslagger who designed for the first Pulitzer Prize winning musical, the Gershwin Depression era "Of Thee I Sing." So you can see, I have an excellent design lineage."

Richard has spent the last dozen years in Colorado, first at Boulder and then at Denver. He has Been active in the Colorado Dance Alliance and the Alliance for Colorado Theatre, all of which are represented on the site he has maintained for Artslynx.

Come September, however, Richard assumes an Assistant Professorship in Theatre Design at James Madison University in Harrisburg, Virginia. "There is dance there in addition to theatre, so I will be able to combine my involvement in both."

Among his official assignments, Richard Finkelstein has made it his business to archival a number of figures and facts on the Competition. "I have individual entries on 14,080 performances, by date and year, since the Jackson Competition started in 1979, even though I didn’t witness some of these performances. I call it minding the intellectual store. These are tools for historical research, and I want to be certain that Jackson has them."

Feeling some frustration because chores interfere with sharing his images with dancers, Richard Concluded his comments to me with the following observation. "I saw Ruta Jezerskyte in rehearsal in 1988, and she made me cry with her portrait of the dancer. She danced it full out in rehearsal and repeated it the same way, to the finger, in performance, at The Gala and the Repeat Performance the following night. When I asked her how she was able to be so consistent, she said, ‘I love the dance. Why would I not do anything less than one hundred percent?’

Having seen Richard’s generosity not only at The Competition, but also with the Website for The Ballets Russes Celebration in 2000, I know he belongs to the same special breed of devotees.

This piece is part of Ballet.co's overall Jackson Competition coverage. The competition runs from the 15th to the 30th June 2002 and we plan daily reports to keep you in touch:
Jackson Reports index page