Wednesday, March 16th, 2011

The Wall Street Journal reports that the New York City Ballet is slated to become one of the country’s first major performing arts companies to oversee and set limits on employees’ social media accounts.  The new policy is reportedly a result of one employee’s tweets.  Devin Alberda, a member of the company’s corps de ballet, responded to the news of his boss’s drunk-driving arrest with the tweet, “Thank goodness riding the subway while intoxicated isn’t a misdemeanor offense #dontfireme.”  In another tweet, he mocked a character in a production with a reference to the presidential executive order that paved the way for Japanese internment camps, tweeting, “Yellowface character in NYCB’s 2010 revival of The Magic Flute the worst thing to happen to the Asian American community since EO 9066.”  With gripes and jokes about the NYC Ballet becoming public via Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets, the company has begun negotiating a social media policy as part of contract talks with the dancers’ union, the American Guild of Musical Artists.  Alan Gordon, the union’s national executive director, said it doesn’t see the need for a social networking policy, but wouldn’t object as long as rules don’t go too far, noting, “in part, City Ballet is a public trust, and because of that employees have the right to use social media to praise or criticize what it does.”  The policy would require dancers to include a disclaimer specifying that their comments are not employer-sanctioned, along with banning them from disclosing another dancer’s injury or illness, from posting photographs of company events, or “persons engaged in New York City Ballet business without their consent.”  Additionally, the NYC Ballet will reserve the right to monitor employees’ postings that are available to the general public.  If the proposal is implemented, the NYC Ballet will be one of the first major performing arts companies in the country to enact such a policy, with the Boston Ballet on its heels, negotiating a similar policy.

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Tags: Alan Gordon, American Guild of Musical Artists, Ballet, Concerts, Dance, Devin Alberda, Facebook, Lincoln Center, Music, New York City Ballet, News, NYC Ballet, Policy, Social Media, Social Networking, Tweets, Twitter