Evaluation of General Sources

After compiling several sources over my controversy, I will now evaluate two of my sources that I believe provide quite a bit of contextual information regarding my subject matter.  I have found that a lot of my information comes online magazine articles and a few blog posts and less from visual sources.

 Source #1:  La Petite Mort: Alastair Macaulay and the Death of Dance Criticism

 

Kolnik, Paul "Jenifer Ringer Career Retrospective" 8/24/2010

• URL: http://www.clydefitchreport.com/2010/12/la-petite-mort-alastair-macaulay-and-the-death-of-dance-criticism/   the dot com mean that it is a corporate site and that there is some commercial purpose to the site.   
• Author: Leonard Jacobs.  Former editor of  Backstage, the trade publication for American actors, and is the founding editor of Theatermania.com.  
• Last Updated: December 5, 2010 
• Purpose: To publicly call out and chastise certain arts critics (including Alastair Macaulay) that have included criticism on the weight and physical appearance of professional performers in their reviews.
• Graphics: There are two images at the beginning that seem to show a blurred human figure moving very quickly.  I'm not exactly sure how this furthers the article.  Perhaps it represents a dancer?
• Position on Subject:  The author definitely disagrees with the Macaulay, and seems to find that he is an insensitive careless writer, whose comment did nothing to further the review.
•  Links: The author includes a few other links with information that further would give the reader more insight into the controversy and the people involved.  The include an article by Jennifer Edwards of the Huffington post, the article by Alastair Macaulay that started the controversy, as well as Macaulay's response to all the negative criticism he received.                     

Source #2: Timeless Alchemy, Even When No One Is Dancing

 

• URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/arts/dance/29nutcracker.html?_r=0  because there is a .com, there means that it is a corporate site that most likely will have commercial purposes.

• Author: Alastair Macaulay.  New York Times chief dance critic and dance historian.
• Last Updated: November 28, 2010
• Purpose:  The purpose of his review was to review the production and dancing of George Balanchine's The Nutcracker. However, in the end paragraph he seems to change his purpose to criticize the two principal dancers' weights.
• Graphics: Two pictures are included.  One is of the entire Nutcracker cast on stage, and the other is of Principal dancer Ashley Bouder, who he praises in the article.  These images are not something that are being used to further the controversy he started though.
• Position on Subject: He seems to believe that Principal dancer Jenifer Ringer, who played the Sugarplum Fairy, seems to be a bit too big, and that her Cavalier, Jared Angle, looks to have gained quite a bit of weight.
• Links: There are links included in his online review; however, they are not links that talk about the controversy, since this review is what started the controversy in the first place. There was a link that he included which seemed to be a video of Ringer dancing the Sugarplum fairy.  It has now been taken down from Youtube though.