Oregon Ballet Theatre

Your Daily Dance Break: Battle of the Giselles - Not just for the ladies

2011-05-20T15:00:00.000-07:00

Giselle is not just all about the ladies. Albrecht, Giselle's prince disguised as a peasant, is one of ballet's most prized roles for men. Barishnykov shows us how it's done, cause 'ya know, he's a DECENT dancer.

Enjoyed your week of Carmen? Loving the week of Giselle? Get ready for the battle royale of vixens vs. ingenues next week!

Your Daily Dance Break: Battle of the Giselles - Alina Cojacaru

2011-05-19T15:00:00.000-07:00

Rounding out the Giselle pack is Alina Cojacaru in her Wili Pas De Deux with Johan Kobborg. Thoughts? Which Giselle is your favorite so far?

Enjoyed your week of Carmen? Loving the week of Giselle? Get ready for the battle royale of vixens vs. ingenues next week!

Your Daily Dance Break: Battle of the Giselles - Allesandra Ferri

2011-05-18T15:00:00.000-07:00

For the next Giselle contender, we are moving to Act II where she's been transformed into an ethereal Wili (a jilted bride ghost that kills men in the forest at night, obviously). Allesandra Ferri makes one gorgeous ghost.

Enjoyed your week of Carmen? Loving the week of Giselle? Get ready for the battle royale of vixens vs. ingenues next week!

Hello! We've Moved!

2011-05-17T15:43:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to let you know that the Oregon Ballet Theatre blog has moved over to Wordpress.

You'll find the latest Daily Dance Breaks, behind the scenes rehearsal reports and saucy fun social media contests over here.

Thanks!

Your Daily Dance Break: Battle of the Giselles - Svetlana Zakharova

2011-05-17T15:00:00.000-07:00

Next up is Svetlana Zakharova's interpretation of Giselle. Spoiler Alert: She goes crazy.

Enjoyed your week of Carmen? Loving the week of Giselle? Get ready for the battle royale of vixens vs. ingenues next week!

Team Carmen vs. Team Giselle: The Tragic Heroine Throwdown Begins!

2011-05-13T16:25:00.000-07:00

The super-secret social media project we've been working on for weeks is finally ready for launch, and boy are we excited. Without further ado, OBT presents . . .

THE TRAGIC HEROINE THROWDOWN!

It's going to be so epic. Click this link to play!

Your Daily Dance Break: Carmen, Flamenco Style

2011-05-13T15:00:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick, colorful, flamenco variation of Carmen to brighten up your Friday.

Enjoyed your week of Carmen? Next week, we'll cross over to the sweethearts and ingenues side for a week of Giselles we have loved...

Your Daily Dance Break: Carmen Shows Her Vixen Side

2011-05-13T10:35:00.000-07:00

This almost NSFW (not safe for work) version features a very sexy Carmen reminding us all that "sweet and innocent" was never a Carmen strong suit.

Happy Birthday Martha Graham!

2011-05-11T15:18:00.000-07:00

People the world over are celebrating the 117th birthday of legendary modern dance innovator Martha Graham thanks to a clever motion-capture Google logo.

Check it out below:

You can sneak a peak at the process that created the Google logo here:

Here's a video of Martha in the iconic dance film Appalachian Spring.

Got a great Martha memory or quote to share? Do tell.

Two Truths and a Lie

2011-05-10T16:24:00.000-07:00

We've been doing a little research on Georges Bizet (composer of Carmen) and we have uncovered some absolutely too good to be true tidbits about him... exactly the sort of racy gossip you would expect of the man who composed the world's most successful opera featuring a decidedly amoral female protagonist.

Some of the tidbits are so unbelievable, in fact, that we'd like to test you to see if you can spot the fiction versus the facts.

Ready to play Two Truths and a Lie: the Classical Edition?

Here we go:

Although Bizet's death certificate claimed his death was by congestive heart failure, the real reason he died was because he was challenged to a icy swimming duel by the illegitimate son of French composer Charles Valentin-Alkan.
When he was 23, Bizet got himself into a bit of a scrape when it was revealed the Bizet family maid was with child. The family tried to claim that the father was George's dad, Adolphe, but later it was discovered that it was really little Georgie who did the deed.
The Opera Comique (where Carmen debuted) were horrified by what a "debauched" character Carmen was. The Opera's box seats were often used by prospective parents to interview their future daughters-in-law and it was thought that racy, fiery, definitely not ladylike Carmen would give these young women the wrong idea.

What do you think the real story is? Identify the lie correctly in the comments below and you'll be entered to win tickets to Petrouchka/Carmen!

Your Daily Dance Break: Carmen... with a cigar

2011-05-10T15:00:00.000-07:00

Continuing our week of Carmens, we present you with:

Shiny skirts, big black balls and Carmen with a cigar... delicious.

Your Daily Dance Break: A Ballet Bullfight

2011-05-09T14:44:00.000-07:00

Christopher Stowell will be choreographing an all new world-premiere ballet set to the music of Bizet's Carmen. Will it be set in Spain? He won't say. Will Carmen be a cigarette factory girl? He won't say. He will say that he and Nicolo Fonte (choreographing the world premiere Petrouchka that will share the same program with Carmen) will be creating ballets that are nothing like any Carmen or Petrouchka you've ever seen.

That sounded like a challenge to us. So all this week we'll be giving you the opportunity to sample some other ballet versions of Carmen so that you will be able to truly assess whether Christopher's vision is "unlike anything you've ever seen."

For starters, we'll show you the bullfight scene from russian ballerina Maya Plisetskaya's Carmen.

SPOILER ALERT: If you don't want to know what happens to Carmen at the end, don't watch the last two minutes...

Top SECRET: In Search of a Few Good Hams

2011-05-06T13:00:00.000-07:00

We could use a few good hams willing to look a little silly and fun for a great cause. It's for a social media project we are doing this summer.

Got a few hours to spare tomorrow (Saturday)? Want to earn a pair of tickets to the ballet? Read on.

What: Super Top Secret Video Social Media Project
When: Saturday, May 7th, 2011
Time: 9 am to 11 am
Location: OBT Studios, 818 SE Morrison
Details: Wear office casual attire (no white or bright red, think something a dull that a cubicle dweller might wear), regular dress casual shoes. Come prepared to learn a super simple choreography. Your two hours of participation with us will earn you a pair of tickets to the show of your choice next season!

Finished project will be part of a YouTube/Facebook/blog social media project that will be posted this summer in July and August. Come make ballet magic with us!

Your Daily Dance Break: The First Lady Helps Kids Get Moving!

2011-05-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

This just in from The Daily Swarm: Michelle Obama teams up with Beyonce to get school kids dancing... and gets caught dancing herself! What a tremendous program and what a brave First Lady!

Enter to Win Season Tickets!

2011-05-03T17:31:00.000-07:00

Would you rather kill for love or die for love?

That's the question at the heart of our 2011/2012 season.

Bizet's Carmen puts a lover in harm's way just so another lover can prove his worth...

Stravinsky's Petrouchka risks it all for love and loses...

Giselle's heart bursts before she will take revenge on a lover who betrays her...

Fortunately for you, neither murder nor suicide is needed to score FREE season tickets to the ballet!

All you need to do is click here to sign up for our e-newsletter by creating or updating your online account with us.

(The link will take you to a Ticketmaster sign up page. Don't worry, all it does is put your email address and preferences into our system so we can keep you up to date on all the bloody backstage goodness.)

On June 30th we'll choose one lucky e-news subscriber to win a pair of season tickets. Ready? Set? WIN.

“People Like a Little Glamour”

2011-04-19T11:46:00.000-07:00

Lifelong musical theatre geek Claire Willett interviews Christopher Stowell about her all-time favorite work in the OBT rep: Stowell’s sparkling, sexy, witty Cole Porter ballet Eyes On You.

Christopher Stowell. Photo by Joni Kabana.

What inspired Eyes On You? How did you come up with the idea?

Well, the practical reason was doing something to recording [because of] not having finances for live music for that program. We opened in the Newmark that year because of The Lion King, we got kicked out of the Keller . . . so there was no orchestra for that program . . . I needed to make a new ballet and I couldn’t use live music. And my thing with recorded music is, if it’s a great, famous, vintage recording, and it’s something we can’t recreate now, then it’s fine. Like, we had done Paul Taylor’s Company B, which is all Andrews Sisters recordings, so of course you do the recordings, you know – those are the people! You know what I mean? So I was looking for a composer that was fun, and that there were interesting recordings of their work, and I liked the idea of vocals in the program. And then it took a turn when Pamela South said, “Oh my God, I love those songs, I would love to sing them,” and I said, “Well, we don’t have any money for you,” and she said, “Well, let’s not worry about that.” But I had already gotten attached to some recordings, so I said, “How about we alternate between vintage recordings and live?” Which is actually kind of cool, I think.

So were you, like, a lifelong Cole Porter fan? I know you’re kind of an old-movies buff . . .

Not particularly Cole Porter – I discovered actually a lot of songs that I knew, that I didn’t –

That you didn’t know were Cole Porter?

Exactly, and I think we all do that, you know? Like, “Oh, I love that song, who wrote that? Cole Porter.” You could say that about, like, eight hundred times. He wrote ‘em all. (Laughs) I don’t remember, but it’s possible that I was not even attached to necessarily Cole Porter strictly in the beginning, but then I saw the wealth of great songs. And what’s really good is that there are a lot of recordings that are not all the same – they’re not all from the same period, they’re not all necessarily sung. Like, “Begin the Beguine” in the ballet is a non-vocal version. “Night and Day” is usually a slow song, but the recording we have of it is fast. So you can have all Cole Porter but you can also have it from different eras and different approaches.

Who picked the music?

I picked all the recordings myself, and then picked songs where I couldn’t find . . . recordings that were danceable, or that I felt like were going to fit in, and those were the things Pamela ended up singing because we could adjust the tempo, take out the bridge, or whatever.

Christopher Stowell's Eyes On You. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

One of the things that really struck me the first time I saw it was how cinematic it feels, with the “The End” marquee and the costumes – was that a deliberate choice or did it evolve as you were working?

I honestly don’t remember exactly the route to that particular idea. What I do remember is just liking the idea of some stereotypical characters, or notions, or situations that happen in those Hollywood movie musicals of the 30’s and 40’s. Like, there’s frequently a bellhop, and there’s often girls that are secretaries on their lunch break. And Latin locales, themes and rhythms were really popular then, so, you know, non-Latin people doing rhumbas and sambas and feeling really sexy is also in all of those movies, frequently. So there’s that in there. The actual marquee – I think that the very first image I had that included the seats was being ironic and starting at the end of something. And what would people be going to in the 30’s and 40’s? They’d be going to the movies.

You mentioned the rhumbas and the sambas, and there are so many different other kinds of non-ballet dance that are sort of incorporated throughout –

Yeah, I guess because it’s natural to those rhythms to want to move in a social dance way. I have actually no social dance training, so everything that’s in there I made up based on some feeling of, like, “Isn’t this kind of like one of those things?” (Laughs) There was one social dance that I had somebody teach me and I can’t remember who it was – it’s in “Begin the Beguine,” the main step in that –

That one’s legit?

Yeah, that one’s legit. The rest I made up.

It’s like the Christopher Stowell version of a foxtrot.

Exactly. If you wiggle your hips, it’s a mambo. (Laughs)

Alison Roper and Ronnie Underwood in Christopher Stowell's Eyes On You. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert

So what’s your choreographic process for a work like this? Anne talked about it a little in her interview from her perspective as a dancer; what’s it like from your end?

Well, this one in particular, the structure of it was comforting, or non-scary, in that it’s episodic – it’s a bunch of numbers. And each number – there should be an arc, but it doesn’t have to be an arc of logic, it needs to be an arc of aesthetic or style, or at least highs and lows that feel like you’re on a little bit of a journey or whatever, but they’re each separate numbers. So I thought, “Who are the principal characters in this?” and then assigned the characters and the dancers I had in mind to particular songs. And then that process makes me feel comfortable; it’s like not having to think about, I don’t know, like reading all of War and Peace. It’s just a chapter, so everybody calm down. It’s just a chapter at a time.

Baby steps.

Exactly! Baby steps, yeah. And then I decided, “Okay, I’m gonna pick a song, and it’s gonna be a song that I associate with Anne, and that’s just gonna be how we get started.” So I’d get in a room with her, with a song that I feel like is about her or for her, and just see what comes up.

Is that different from how you’d choreograph something like Rite of Spring with the bigger arc to it?

No, actually. Rite of Spring scared the shit out of me – unlike, you know, ten cute Cole Porter tunes. (Laughs) And I started the process exactly the same way, to calm myself down.

Break it into little chunks.

Break it into chunks, and get one person in the room – Anne, let’s say – and let’s make something up. Because as soon as I have something to work with, I feel better. When I feel like I have to come up with thirty-five minutes of steps, I’m like, “Oh my God . . .”

Anne Mueller in Christopher Stowell's Eyes On You. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

When it’s like, staring you in the face and you’re like, “Holy crap.”

Yes! Exactly. So it’s like, “Okay, let’s make two steps, and then we’ll make four steps . . .”

One of the things I like about Eyes on You is that it’s so funny – I feel like that’s something that comes through in a lot of the works in our rep. Is that something that you like in your work?

Yeah, definitely. I do like to do that. But I like to mostly make situations that can be funny, and not say, “Here, do this gag,” and “Here, do that gag,” overtly. There are some gags in this – there are, but they need to be done subtly. I didn’t want it packed with one spit-take after another. Like, that’s too much.

Slapstick.

Slapstick, yeah. But it also makes sense with both the music and the aesthetic that inspired the thing, because those movies often were comedies, so I like the funny situation more than the fall-down-on-your-face stuff.

Did you watch a lot of the old 40’s movies when you were a kid? Did you grow up with that aesthetic?

Fred Astaire movies, for sure. Fred and Ginger stuff. My father is a huge fan of all of those movies – Gene Kelly, the whole genre. Yeah. So I did grow up seeing those. But then I actually got my hands on – I can’t remember what they were now – some movies that I did not know that were Cole Porter scores. And that was actually helpful because they were kind of obscure, so, I mean, they were probably fun at the time but they’re not classics, you know what I mean? But it gave me some insight into different situations than the ones we remember all the time. They were so specific, you know – they did a lot of, like, they’re in a war, or they’re stuck in Panama . . .

The catalog is just huge.

Yeah.

The number of things he wrote –

They must have churned them out, those movies. Like, make it in two weeks, boom, let’s go.

Did you do musical theatre as a kid?

Nope. I would have been happy to, though. I acted a little bit when I was a kid, before I started ballet, in school. I did do Annie, Get Your Gun. Yes. I was Little Jake in Annie, Get Your Gun. If I’d had any kind of voice I would have preferred doing that, frankly. Way more fun.

More fun than ballet?

Yeah! Ballet’s hard! It’s a lot of work! (Laughs)

And there’s no jazz hands in ballet.

No jazz hands! I know!

Anne Mueller and company in Christopher Stowell's Eyes On You. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

Eyes On You is such an audience favorite. Why do you think people respond to it so much?

I hate to use the word “accessible,” but I think the thing that scares people sometimes about dance is “I don’t get it,” and there’s no question of not getting it, really. Well, actually – once, I forget if it was a review or if it was someone talking to me, but they said, “I don’t get why they’re in their underwear,” and I’m like, “Uh, it’s funny. That’s it. That’s the end of the story.” “Well, if they were in the movies they wouldn’t be in their underwear!” And I’m like, “Um, you’re thinking way too hard.” (Laughs) Like, it’s madcap. Whatever. What was the question? Oh, accessibility. Right. So, comfort level – I think it makes people relaxed, like, “I get this genre.” I think a lot of people like a little glamour too, and it has beautiful costumes that move a lot. And all of that also makes the dancers relax, and I think audiences get to see maybe more personality than they might in other [ballets], which is more appropriate in this, too. And it’s very infectious music, too. You feel yourself snapping your fingers a little bit, like, “I know the words to this song.” It’s just fun.

What’s your favorite Cole Porter song? Do you have a personal favorite?

My favorite recording in the show is the first one, “De-Lovely,” because it’s really, really clever – the lyrics are really clever. You know what’s really good – it’s not in the show – is, how does it go? (singing unintelligibly under his breath) Oh, it’s “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall In Love.” Brilliant lyrics, so funny. I almost used a recording of Alanis Morissette singing that [from the film De-Lovely], but it kind of fluctuates tempo a lot – so you’re like dancing dancing dancing, “Wait, why is she slowing down?” [EDITOR’S NOTE: Rather than transcribe for you the next 5 minutes where we geeked out about the De-Lovely soundtrack, I’ll just give you the link and tell you that Christopher’s favorite track is “True Love” sung by Ashley Judd, and mine is “Night and Day” sung by Kevin Kline with John Barrowman of Doctor Who and Torchwood fame. Now back to our regularly-scheduled programming.]

So how does the process change, now that you’re doing it again with different dancers?

Honestly, with a ballet like this, it is a little – not “challenging,” but there’s another dimension to it. Because you want, if not the same, a similar, equally effective effect, and people are different people with different bodies and different personalities. So I probably adjust things in this more than I would in something else, because the point is the ultimate effect and not the individual steps, necessarily, or where to put the emphasis of either a gag, or a romantic look, or whatever like that. But I do get attached in something like this more than in other things, like, “You’re not doing that thing that so-and-so did that was so funny!” But then I have to step back and go, “They can’t be that person.” And I’ve found that asking them to do something that was basically an inspired moment by one dancer, asking another dancer to do it is usually not effective. It wouldn’t feel natural to them.

So what made you decide to bring it back for this season, and how does it fit in with the other pieces in Song & Dance?

Well, we brought it back because, you know, marketing directors are always happy. Like, “Give me something that’s gonna sell a lot of tickets!” (Laughs) In this particular program – so Square Dance wasn’t on the program yet when I planned it because we added it later. [With Left Unsaid and Speak], well, I don’t know if “heavy” is the right word, but there’s some darkness and some earthbound-ness and some seriousness about those works that needed some complementing with something light.

How did you come up with the name Eyes On You? It’s not in any of the songs in the piece.

The naming of the piece was actually fun. I was choreographing it during OBT Exposed!, when we had the tent in the park in the fall, and I think we showed some Cole Porter movies in the evening and had some popcorn, to sort of get people who were interested in the ballet focused on Cole Porter and the process of creating this new work. And then I think I had to give a lecture one night, and I hadn’t come up with a name for the piece, and I said, “Well, I’ll throw it out to the audience.” There were maybe fifty people there, and everyone wrote down their thought for a name for the piece and we collected them, and – it was actually longer, it was “Eyes on blah blah blah blah blah something,” but I read all of them, all those little slips of paper and then saw that one. And I reduced it, edited it a little bit, and liked it, and got in touch with that person, and they got credit and free tickets to the ballet.

That’s awesome.

Yeah. I like the title. People have said, you know, is it “Eyes On You” or I-apostrophe-S, like “I’s on you?” (Laughs)

It works on so many levels.

Yeah.

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Song & Dance, featuring Eyes On You is at the Newmark Theatre April 21 - May 1.

more posts about Song & Dance | Buy Tickets to Song & Dance

Your Daily Dance Break: Yo Yo Ma and Lil Buck

2011-04-15T13:10:00.000-07:00

It seems we are not the only ones creating a little classical/hip hop fusion. Check out this extraordinary video of famed cellist Yo Yo Ma collaborating with hip hop dance artist Lil Buck on a brief improvised performance piece.

We present this in honor of our sister organization Portland Center Stage's opening night performance of Opus. Break legs, guys! Or, as we say in the dance world, "Merd."

Gargouillade and Entrechat: the Filigree Footwork of Square Dance

2011-04-14T09:23:00.000-07:00

by Linda Besant

“More steps per minute than any other show in town,” said dance writer Nancy Reynolds of Square Dance. For fifty years, audiences have been wowed by this non-stop ballet:

“Tempos that could only be called lickety-split.” (Manchester, 1958)

“Filigree footwork that requires the most astonishing technical dexterity.” (Kaplan, 1988)

“The speed of the footwork…could be compared to breaking the four-minute mile.” (Vranish, 2007)

Pacific Northwest Ballet principal dancers Carrie Imler and Lucien Postlewaite with company dancers in Square Dance, choreographed by George Balanchine © The George Balanchine Trust. Photo © Angela Sterling

Patricia Wilde, on whom the principal role in Square Dance was created in 1957, described Balanchine's emphasis on the foot in this kind of choreography. “From the moment it left the floor, the foot had to draw the eye to it -- we really worked on that." Under Balanchine's direction, less time was spent in plié or in preparing for a movement. "Don't sit there and have a cup of coffee," he would say, pushing for accents that were out and up. Square Dance “has a terrific bounce and a very unique drive. It was a joyous experience. Mr. B wanted it to be fun.”

Merrill Ashley, who took on Square Dance in 1977, remains among the most acclaimed ballerinas to accomplish the principal role. "The ballet was filled with fast footwork, jumps, and beats, all part of the standard classical ballet vocabulary, but the steps had to be done in a much freer and more spontaneous way than in most 'classical' ballets. A joyful I-love-to-dance approach was needed . . . Many of the steps seemed to have their own momentum, which swept me along, and I felt in perfect harmony with the music and choreography."

OBT’s Ballet Master Lisa Kipp taught Square Dance to the company. She performed it with Ballet Chicago in the 1990s. “It’s one of my best memories, and the music is beautiful,” Lisa says, “but it was the most exhausted I ever got, ever, You have to reach down into the depths and pull something out if you’re going to get to the end of the ballet. You hit the wall and go past it. There’s a weird euphoria to that.”

Here are a couple of examples of the allegro steps and jumps in Square Dance that dancers find most challenging:

Gargouillade: (literally means gurgling or rumbling) Both legs execute a rond de jambe in l’air (circle of the legs in the air) almost simultaneously, while the body is in the air. “Like a kitten with tape stuck to its paws,” says OBT dancer Andrea Cooper.

This video excerpt of Pacific Northwest Ballet's Square Dance rehearsal shows Carrie Imler tossing off her gargouillades with ease. She does the first gargouillade at the very beginning of the video, and the corps repeat her movement in the next moment.

Long strings of échappés interwoven with entrechats six

Échappé: An escaping or slipping movement where the feet go from a closed to an open position, both sauté (jumping the feet apart), and sur les pointes (on the toes).

Entrechat six: Interweaving or braiding. A step of beating in which the dancer jumps into the air and rapidly crosses the legs before and behind each other.

Christopher Stowell says, “It’s not so much that these steps are hard but that there are so many of them.” Damara Bennett, Director of the School of OBT, adds, “It’s relentless, and exhilarating.”

To see demonstrations of échappé and entrachat so that you can recognize them in the finale of Square Dance, visit American Ballet Theatre's Online dance dictionary.

more posts about Song & Dance | Buy Tickets to Song & Dance

Six Degrees of Cole Porter

2011-04-12T11:54:00.000-07:00

By Claire Willett

Cole Porter

“Six Degrees of Separation” is a statistical theory model which suggests that every human being on earth is connected to every other human being on earth through no more than six other people. That is beyond the scope of this undertaking, so we’re going to stick with its far-less-weighty spinoff, the pop-culture parlor game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” which adapts this model to suggest that any Hollywood actor can be connected to movie star Kevin Bacon through no more than six movies. Bacon, a true Renaissance man (actor, director, musician, writer, producer) is a prolific Hollywood workhorse with over 70 movies to his name, in many different genres, which means has amassed a staggering array of celebrity co-stars, which is why the game works.

Kevin Bacon in Footloose

You may be skeptical. “Sure, it would work with Rob Lowe or Demi Moore,” you say, “but what about someone like, say, Orson Welles?”

Orson Welles

Easy! Orson Welles was in the original Casino Royale with Ursula Andress who was in Clash of the Titans with Laurence Olivier who was in Dracula with Frank Langella who was in Frost/Nixon with Kevin Bacon. BACON SCORE = 4.

Kevin Bacon is all well and good, but if we want to talk about the ultimate Renaissance man we must go back to singer/songwriter/pianist/musical theatre composer/social butterfly Cole Porter, who seemed to know every even remotely famous person in the first half of the 20th century. The hottest silver screen stars sang and danced in his films and Broadway shows; celebrity composers and artists hung out at his lavish cocktail parties. He defined an entire era with his witty lyrics and champagne-sparkling melodies, and the reverberations of his impact on popular music and culture are still felt today. Was there anyone worth knowing in 1920’s Paris that Cole Porter never shared a drink with? Not by my reckoning. In honor of our upcoming Cole Porter-themed ballet “Eyes On You,” I’d like to test that theory with a little game called “Six Degrees of Cole Porter.” Stop scrolling as you make your guesses - the solution is right below the image. (If you figure out a way to get there in fewer moves, post it in the comments.)

Ready? Let’s play!

6 MOVES: Black Swan star Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman in Black Swan

**NATALIE PORTMAN SOLUTION**

Natalie Portman was in Closer with Julia Roberts who was in Ocean’s Eleven with Elliott Gould who was in The Muppet Movie with James Coburn who was in Charade with Cary Grant who was in The Philadelphia Story with Jimmy Stewart who was in Born To Dance with a score by Cole Porter.

5 MOVES: Film and Musical Theatre Actor Hugh Jackman

Hugh Jackman

**HUGH JACKMAN SOLUTION**

Hugh Jackman did voice-over work for Happy Feet with Robin Williams who was in Dead Poet’s Society with Robert Sean Leonard who stars on House with Hugh Laurie who was in Jeeves and Wooster written by PG Wodehouse who wrote the book to Anything Goes with Cole Porter.

4 MOVES: First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt

**ELEANOR ROOSEVELT SOLUTION**

Eleanor Roosevelt was married to Franklin Delano Roosevelt who was succeeded in the Oval Office by Harry Truman whose Secretary of State was Dean Acheson who was roommates at Harvard Law School with Cole Porter.

3 MOVES: Fashion Designer Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel

**COCO CHANEL SOLUTION**

Coco Chanel had an affair with Igor Stravinsky who composed Firebird for the Ballets Russe who were once hired to perform at an extravagant private ball in Venice by Cole Porter.

2 MOVES: Who’s the Boss star Tony Danza

Tony Danza

**TONY DANZA SOLUTION**

Tony Danza was in the Laughing With the Presidents TV special with Bob Hope who was in Red, Hot and Blue written by Cole Porter.

1 MOVE: Fred Astaire


Fred Astaire

**FRED ASTAIRE SOLUTION**

Fred Astaire starred in Gay Divorce written by Cole Porter.

Want to take a stab at it? Try connecting Cole Porter and OBT Artistic Director Christopher Stowell. Yes, it can be done, we’ve tested it! The first person who posts a comment below doing it in the fewest number of moves by April 15th (feel free to be creative!) will win a pair of tickets to Song & Dance. Post your ideas below in the comments!

Why Do We Do What We Do?

2011-04-11T10:31:00.000-07:00

Thanks so much to everyone who helped to make Saturday Night's Moveable Feast Gala such a success! If you weren't able to join us, take a moment to check out this short video sharing why we do what we do...

If you would like to contribute to OBT's Education and Outreach opportunities, please contact Emily at emily.tucker@obt.org.

Yoga and Ballet: Finding the flow in "Left Unsaid"

2011-04-07T14:19:00.000-07:00

By OBT Historian Linda Besant

Are Locusts and Downward Facing Dogs a regular part of your life? If so, then you won’t want to miss seeing Left Unsaid in OBT’s “Song and Dance” program that opens April 21st. Choreographer Nicolo Fonte is a devoted practitioner of Iyengar yoga, and his ballet is rich with artistically extended poses.

We asked Julie Gudmestad, one of Portland’s premier yoga instructors, to take a look at Left Unsaid and weigh in on this seamless melding of Eastern and Western physicality. Julie has movement credentials that just won’t quit—she graduated as a physical therapist in 1977, and she’s been certified as an Iyengar instructor since 1988; but we didn’t know until we asked for her help that she also studied classical ballet as a girl, and was a serious student of modern dance at Reed College.

Julie knew of worldwide movements of rhythmic yoga and yoga choreography, but said right away that Left Unsaid is different. Those ways of moving are built exclusively from poses, or asanas. “In formal practice,” Julie said, “it’s pretty prescribed how you go into and out of each pose, especially in Iyengar yoga. What’s so refreshing about Left Unsaid are the creative and organic ways that Nicolo Fonte coils into and on through each pose. In yoga practice, we form vinyasas, or flowing combinations of asanas. One definition of the Sanskrit word vinyasa is wind, and you can see the wind in this piece. People who practice these poses will be delighted at the way this choreography flows.”

Julie also complimented OBT’s dancers. “It is a real treat," she said, “to see people in such fabulous shape, who have both the flexibility and the strength to do the extreme forms of these poses." In fact, many of OBT's dancers regularly practice yoga.

We picked a part of Left Unsaid where the yoga is particularly clear, and Julie pointed out places where the choreography lingers on poses long enough to see them clearly, though they are often varied or ornamented slightly. You will see:

Warrior I Virabhadrasana I
Bridge Setu Bandha Sarvangasana
Boat Navasana
Locust Salabasana
Staff Pose (Plank) Dandasana
Standing Big Toe Pose Uhita Hasta Padangustasana

Can you spot these asanas as they flow by?

Julie Gudmestad practices physical therapy and teaches yoga with her team of nine instructors at Gudmestad Yoga Studio. You can also see her work in the Yoga Journal online, where she wrote the "Anatomy of a Yogi" column for seven years.

Love yoga? Show us your own best yoga move by posting a pic on our Facebook Wall and you'll be entered to win tickets to Song & Dance. We'll pick a winner Friday April 15th. GO.

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Nicolo Fonte Discusses Left Unsaid with Dance Magazine

2011-04-06T11:57:00.000-07:00

(Anne Mueller, Artur Sultanov, Brian Simcoe and Steven Houser in Nicolo Fonte's Left Unsaid. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert)

Wendy Perrin from Dance Magazine recently sat down with choreographer Nicolo Fonte to discuss his approach to choreography and his current most popular work, Left Unsaid, which will be presented as part of our spring program, Song & Dance.

Check out the interview here.

You can watch a full sneak peek video of Left Unsaid here:

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Daily Dance Break: Sand Painting

2011-04-05T15:52:00.000-07:00

Your Daily Dance Break: In honor of Anne's "sand ninja" blog post, a mesmerizing sand painting performance. The way the artist shapes the sand to music is like watching a choreographed dance... don't you think?

Daily Dance Break: A Different Kind of Street Dance Battle

2011-04-04T17:23:00.000-07:00

Here's a little taste of the kind of street dance battles that are referenced in Trey McIntyre's Speak, which is part of our Song & Dance program opening April 20th.

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The Life and times of Anne Mueller Part Five: "It Was like Being a Ninja"

2011-04-04T13:15:00.000-07:00

Anne Mueller and John Michael Schert for Trey McIntyre Project. Photo by Jonas Lundqvist.

Photo shoots are part of the package when you’re a professional ballet dancer; compelling, arresting images that show off the grace and physicality of the company’s dancers are part of every marketing staff’s standard bag of tricks. Anne Mueller has done her fair share of photo shoots for OBT, but the craziest shoot of her life actually happened in summer of 2004 with the as-yet-barely-in-existence Trey McIntyre Project.

“Trey had been a good friend of mine for a very long time,” says Anne. At the time, he was working as a freelance choreographer making work on many different companies, but “He was craving an opportunity to work with a consistent group of dancers of his choosing,” she explains, “while also not yet wanting to take on the directorship of a full-time company.” It began with a series of phone conversations Anne had with Trey and his partner John Michael Schert; Anne and John Michael had never met in person before they all decided collectively to join forces and collaborate on this process. “We decided to go for it,” Anne says, “so the first question was, ‘Where do we start?’” The answer? A photo shoot. “We came to the conclusion that the first thing we really needed were images,” she says. “If we’re going to sell people on a company that doesn’t exist, we need some good, striking images to give them some sort of idea what this whole thing’s going to be about.” After a not-so-successful initial attempt, Anne flew out to New York on a red-eye for a second attempt at the critical photo shoot (“I think I was there for maybe 48 hours, tops”) as well as discussions about how to create a fundraising strategic plan and marketing materials.

Jonas Lundqvist, a Finnish photographer who had danced with Pennsylvania Ballet, had flown out from Finland to New York to do the shoot, but the location and concept remained elusive. There was a lot at stake – the images had to capture and define the aesthetic of a company that didn’t technically exist yet, and inspire presenters to take a chance on them. They did some trial shots on rooftops and on the streets of New York City, trying to get passersby to react; “but nobody there reacts,” says Anne, “so that wasn’t very fun.” Somehow – she can’t remember how it was decided or who thought of it – they settled on doing the shoot at the beach. So they drove an hour from Brooklyn to Queens to do the shoot at Rockaway Beach.

The costume element for the shoot hadn’t been finalized beforehand; Anne kept asking Trey what to wear and he kept telling her he wanted them both in what she describes as “people clothes.” But Anne, convinced that when push came to shove Trey would change his mind, was prepared. “I did bring some people clothes, but I kept thinking, ‘He’s probably going to want more body than that.’ So I just made sure that I had on a good pair of black underwear.” On the beach, under the hot August sun, Anne stripped down to her black camisole and underwear to get a little sun; when Trey saw her he said, “Oh, actually that outfit’s really good.” (MORAL OF THE STORY: Always wear good underwear to photo shoots, just in case. I’m pretty sure I’ve actually seen that on America’s Next Top Model.)

The actual shooting began around three in the afternoon, and at first it was stressful and nerve-wracking. Anne and John Michael had never met prior to the trip, “but suddenly he and I were thrust into what’s actually a very personal and vulnerable situation –improvisational dancing with somebody for a camera at close range under high pressure.” Initially Jonas shot them both individually and as a pair, and Anne says “we were both just kind of stumbling through.” They shot for about five hours under intense strain, and then the sun started to set, creating additional pressure to get it right before the light was gone. Towards the end, she says, “I think John Michael and I had worked ourselves to a place of frustration to where we were ready to just abandon ourselves, which I think really shows in these images – we’re just absolutely throwing it all out there.”

Trey came up with the idea to make the most out of the great sunset light and take advantage of the little time they had left, and told Anne and John-Michael, “Okay, you start on this side, and you start on this side, and run towards each other, and when you’re in front of the camera, do something.” “We didn’t plan what we were going to do,” Anne says, “we just ran.” They did this rapid-fire for a long, long time, says Anne – it was “Run! Do something! Run! Do something!” over and over. “I’m very proud of these pictures because they’re just crazy,” Anne says. “There’s nothing being held back by either one of us. But we also have really contrasting qualities: he’s a very long, elegant and lyrical dancer, and I’m more power-oriented and kind of snappy.” Anne’s favorite shot of John Michael was one where “he threw himself into a fetal position perfectly sideways to the ground and then just collapsed on the sand. Unfortunately they asked him to do it again, which I think he regretted because it hurt! But that was kind of a wonderful thing about the sand – we could hit the ground in a way that you really can’t on a normal type of surface, so we were able to do things we wouldn’t have been able to do elsewhere.” Her favorite shot of herself? “There’s one where I’m jumping up and my legs are basically just in fifth, a little bit of a pike, and I had sand in my hands, and I threw it right as I jumped, and the sand makes this gorgeous X pattern in the sky in front of me. It felt like being a ninja or something!”

Anne Mueller for Trey McIntyre Project. Photo by Jonas Lundqvist.

The shoot went on for a long, long time, she says, “and we captured a lot of really powerful images.” You’d never know from looking at the photos now that “it was one of the most gross and grueling experiences of my dance career. . . we had sand in every possible place sand could be, you know,” she laughs, “and then we had to sit in a car, sweaty and sandy and disgusting, to drive an hour back to Brooklyn.” But it was worth it. The shoot inspired the concept for the next few TMP seasons as well; the following year Trey shot the dancers himself in the water, and then the following year the concept was Air.

Anne remains incredibly proud of that first shoot on the beach. “I really love those pictures,” she says. “I feel like the power of those images did what it needed to do to give that company a start. They had to be powerful enough to make presenters want to take a chance on something that didn’t exist. That’s got to be something pretty tangible. Trey’s reputation obviously speaks for itself, but really to sell somebody on something in a visual art form, you’ve got to have something visual. And I think that branding-wise, that really set the tone for what that company was going to be like and how it was going to speak its message to the community.”

Are you an Anne fan? What do you think is Anne’s most recognizable, iconic role? Post your thoughts below in the comments!

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"It's Really a Street Brawl"

2011-04-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

Former OBT dancer Matthew Boyes shares his memories of Speak, Trey McIntyre’s ballet set to a spoken-word piece by Tracie Morris and the hip-hop music of The Bloodhound Gang.

Vanessa Thiessen and Matthew Boyes in the world premiere of Trey McIntyre's Speak.
Oregon Ballet Theatre, 1998. Photo by David Straub.

By Claire Willett

How was the piece conceived?

Speak was created on Vanessa Thiessen and myself when OBT was still [performing] in the former Masonic Temple, now the new wing of the Portland Art Museum. Trey had already choreographed Like a Samba [on OBT dancers] and I believe this was his second piece for the company. It is a true reflection of pop culture at that time. Both Trey and James Canfield were always inspired and intrigued by contemporary life. Rap music and hip-hop had already been around for a number of years, but spoken word was just coming out. Spoken word [had] a more urban/intellectual vibe; people would go to coffee houses and act like modern-day beat poets of sorts.

What was Trey’s vision for the piece?

He really made the duet . . . a conversation between two people. He would never talk about what to [think] while dancing this. Every movement [he] choreographed expressed exactly what he wanted, without him [needing to waste] words on explanation. [The piece is so] different from most classical dance in that there is no love story told between the man and woman.

What was it like to dance Speak?

When we would rehearse he pushed us to our physical extremes, traversing the stage from end to end. For me, if the choreography called for a gesture or kick, it had to start from a thought and explode as a movement. The duet is really a "street brawl" between two friends. [It’s] a battle of the sexes with the girl kicking the guy’s butt – literally and figuratively – in the end . . . The female solo was just raw movement, and looked nothing like ballet. Of course it takes a trained dancer to make this type of dance really look tight and fierce . . . After dancing Speak I would want to just lay on the floor and catch my breath, but as soon as I rolled offstage I knew I would have to turn around and run out for the bow.

SPEAK - excerpt from Trey McIntyre Project on Vimeo.

How did audiences receive it?

The audience would always go insane with applause! People really liked it. Usually it would be sandwiched in the middle of the evening's program [and] the other ballets would be more “balletic,” so the contrast would really surprise and wake up the audience.

On Anne Mueller

I would like to congratulate Anne Mueller on her many years with both James and Christopher at the helm of the company. Her personal integrity and work ethic, not to mention her beauty, have stood as an excellent example for [several] generations of dancers. Thank you, Anne, for your friendship and unstoppable drive.

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Your Daily Dance Break: A Very Special Guest Star

2011-04-01T13:27:00.000-07:00

We are THRILLED to announce that Christopher Walken will be a very special guest star in "Eyes On You" during the run of Song and Dance! Check out the video for a sampling of his dance moves.

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Your Daily Dance Break: Singing in the Rain

2011-03-31T15:40:00.000-07:00

A true classic that proves that all these rainy days we've had in Portland don't have to be gloomy.

Your Daily Dance Break: A Contotionist Does a Yoga Inspired Dance

2011-03-30T15:13:00.000-07:00

A quick survey of other dances inspired by yoga (like Nicolo Fonte's Left Unsaid in our upcoming Song & Dance program) reveals the following:

We think she must be made out of rubber. Don't you?

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Your Daily Dance Break: Tanaquil LeClercq & Nicholas Magallanes | Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive

2011-03-29T14:19:00.000-07:00

Today's Daily Dance Break comes from the Jacob's Pillow Dance Video Archive, an amazing online resource for historical dance video.

It's a Balanchine piece filmed at the Festival in the '40s and well worth a look. The only downside? The archive doesn't let you embed video so you'll need to click on the link to check it out. Enjoy!

Tanaquil LeClercq & Nicholas Magallanes | Jacob's Pillow Dance Interactive

The Life and Times of Anne Mueller Part Four: Anne on Christopher

2011-03-29T12:44:00.000-07:00

OBT staffer Claire Willett sits down with Anne Mueller to talk all things Christopher Stowell – how she met him, how she would describe him in three words (HINT: she can’t), her favorite Stowell role, how she’s grown as a dancer over the past few years, and the one time she got to dance with him.

by Claire Willett

CW: What was the first role you danced for Christopher?
AM: Well, the first rep was Duo Fantasy, which was a ballet of his father’s; Rubies; a Helgi Tomasson pas de deux called Twilight, which sounds weird now because of the vampire books but I think that’s what it was called; and then [Paul Taylor’s] Company B. I danced the "Pennsylvania Polka" in Company B. I also danced in the corps of Rubies, and I was second cast in Duo Fantasy, which was a trio. And I really liked Duo Fantasy, it was very much a kind of movement that I was really comfortable doing and liked doing a lot. But the first kind of featured role he put me in was the "Pennsylvania Polka".

What’s your favorite thing you’ve worked on since Christopher got here?
I think my most favorite thing of my time with Christopher is the new works that he’s created. I absolutely love the process of the creation of new work, from all angles – I like it at the front of the studio, I like to be a dancer doing it, I just like everything about it. And his approach to how he wants us to work extends to his creation of new material, so I suddenly felt like I had this outlet and opportunity to bring more of myself to what I was doing. And it’s really exciting when you do that and somebody’s interested in it. It makes for – I hesitate to use the word “collaborative,” because it’s not a collaboration; when he makes work, it’s his work – but you as the paint on the canvas get to define a little more about where the paint goes. (Laughs) Not a perfect analogy. But you know what I’m saying.

What’s your favorite role that Christopher created on you?
Rite of Spring. Definitely. I feel like that choreography and dramatic tone and musical design, I think all of it captures who I am as a dancer and a person more perfectly than anything else I’ve ever done.

Anne Mueller and Lucas Threefoot in Christopher Stowell's The Rite of Spring, 2011. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

Did it feel differently doing it again? Was it more relaxed having it under your belt the second time, because you’d been there before, or do you like the adrenaline of doing it the first time?
Both times were an amazing experience. I think a lot of times with me, when I come back to something, I want more. I want more the second time around, like, this position needs to be bigger, longer, deeper, I just wanted to give it more volume. But I did dance with a different person the second time around, and that inevitably changes the process too. Which is a fabulous experience. But it wasn’t like returning to what it had been before – it was sort of inherently different.

What have you seen in terms of how the company has grown and changed since Christopher got here?
Well, when he got here, the group that he started with was an amalgam; some people were holdovers from the James years, and then there were all these other people he had pulled together from various different auditions and places – some of them he knew well and some he barely knew at all. It was a real potpourri of people initially. I think it really helps to have a director that’s a choreographing director, because I think through the creation of work and through having the dancers dance the work of the director, we build an understanding of – I don’t want to say “style,” but, what is important in the vision of this director. I think that he chooses people that are performers. Not in a Broadway, jazz-hands kind of way, but I think he likes people to be exciting and in the moment and really give themselves to the performing experience, and not, like, be careful at all. He doesn’t want us to be careful. So I think generally we’re a group of people that really like to just get out there and put on a show. …. Christopher, he wants you to explore yourself as an artist, you know, so there’s a lot more freedom to interpret and be musical, for instance. He himself, you can tell, is an incredibly, incredibly musical person and performer, and he really increased my level of awareness about that and certainly opened up that as an area of exploration for me. He also encourages a really sophisticated use of the upper body – of port de bras and the upper body “epaulement” we call it, “shouldering.” So that’s something that’s very important to him, and you can see it in the dancers in the company.

So I think that we’re courageous performers, we’re musical, and we try really hard to have sophisticated port de bras. (Laughs) And, you know what? Even more than that, I think personality-wise, like, we have a lot of very funny people, you know? These things are important when you’re going to be in the studio with somebody for long hours and under lots of stress with them. It’s important that the working environment be a place that feels . . . I don’t want to use the word “comfortable” because that’s not the right word, but feels good and is positive and creates an environment in which we can excel.

Christopher Stowell choreographing for the world premiere of The Rite of Spring in 2009. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

That you like coming to work with those people.
And he likes working with those people. And we like working with him.

And I think that comes through in the dancing. Like, I didn’t come here with any ballet background and it was astonishing to me, when I first saw The Concert, that ballet could be funny. It just wasn’t –
It wasn’t in your consciousness.

Right. And then all of a sudden you’re like, “This is hilarious.” And those personalities come through, so the dance can be funny, or sexy or compelling –
Or scary.

Or scary, yeah.
Any of those things.

Emotions that people who don’t know a lot about ballet don’t think of as –
As being part of the spectrum.

Yeah, as being something that ballet evokes.
Right.

What is Christopher like backstage on opening night? Does he get fidgety, or is he pretty calm?
You know, he’s really good about knowing when it’s time to step away and let the experience be in the dancers’ hands. It’s really uncomfortable for the dancers, once you’re dealing with the stress of even dress rehearsals, let alone opening night; and if someone’s, like, breathing down your neck, that doesn’t help. So he’s great about knowing when to just let it be in our hands. I’m sure he has an amount of stress or anxiety or anticipation or nervousness, but he does not put that on us.

Anne Mueller and Christopher Stowell backstage before The Stravinsky Project. Photo by Motoya Nakamura for The Oregonian.

He can sort of walk away.
Yeah. Which is great. (Laughs) Because you have your own to deal with.

So in terms of transitioning into your new role at OBT, what are you most excited about in the new dynamic of how you’re going to work with Christopher? I mean, you’ve been doing it –
Yeah. That’s exactly what I was going to say. What I really like about this is it’s NOT a new role. It’s an expansion of a role I’m already filling, so I don’t feel like I’m leaping into some great vast unknown. I work in the studio with the dancers, I set ballets, there’s a dynamic that’s established. And there’s a dynamic as to how I work with him on matters outside the studio that’s already established too. So I look forward to just doing that a lot more. I feel like I already have a pretty good level of involvement with the administrative staff, but I look forward to more of that, getting to know people better and work with them more closely and know more about what everybody does. (Laughs) That’s kind of a lame answer.

Tell me a funny Christopher story.
I got to dance with him one time, which was really a lot of fun for me. He was the surprise guest artist at Susannah Mars’ Mars on Life show one year. She wanted Christopher to dance, and he asked me if I would dance with him, and of course I was very, very flattered and said yes. And to make it even more fantastic and surprising, we did a dance choreographed by Yuri. So it was like in the middle of Nutcracker, Christopher and I were in the studio together as dancers with Yuri Possokhov, choreographing, I think it was Irving Berlin’s “Let Yourself Go.” It was hysterical. I think I was just trying to behave, and be what I was supposed to be in the moment, and the two of them, they have so much camaraderie, so I was seeing a side of their relationship that I’d never seen before. So that was surprising and new. And actually performing was a total blast. It was great. I feel like it never would have happened that we would have ended up in the same place at the same time dancing together, but I could tell even before that that he’s someone I would have loved to have had the chance to dance with. So that was very cool to do that.

So then the next year we went back, and he says “I’m not dancing again, I’m retired. So what are we going to do this year?” So we engineered a sort of audience participation number, which was just a hysterical good time. We made up some super basic vocabulary that anyone could do. We just met in the studio on one off day and made up about eight basic moves, and then we put the eight basic moves together in three different phrases. One of them was “Elf Walk,” one we called “The Sugarplum Fairy” which was a very simplified version of something the Sugarplum Fairy does in her variation, and then I think we did (she does a huge “jazz hands” arc) “Snowflakes!” They were fun, a little bit goofy, and very easy. So we designed this dance for I think nine people. We got nine volunteers from the audience and we taught them their material and cued them to do their material on the music, so it was like (snapping her fingers) “Group A, 6, 7, 8! Group B, 6, 7, 8!” And then we sort of marched them into a new, mixed-up pattern, so it was like ABA in the first line, then CBC in the second line, and then cued them to do their material. So it looked super fancy. It was great because we were showing the audience “This is how you make choreography – you start with these themes and then manipulate them in these ways.” But it was just absolutely hysterical; the audience was having a blast and the people dancing were having a blast. It was a really good time. I had a wand, I wore a crown, it was great.

And you’ve done Susannah’s show with him every time, right?
Right. And then this year Steven and I danced and he came and talked. Those were fun.

So if somebody came to you who had never seen anything Christopher had choreographed before, and was like, “What’s his choreography like?”, how would you describe it?
Well, I would probably pick a couple different ballets and say “Go look at these,” so they could kind of experience the range of where his work goes. I would pick something classical like Sleeping Beauty, and then I would pick something like Rite of Spring, and then I would pick something like Eyes on You. I think what I would say is that because he’s such an incredibly musical person, the work that he creates – the style of it – is absolutely defined by what the music is. He does not choreograph Rite of Spring the same way he choreographs Eyes on You, you know?

I’d think you’d get to know somebody very quickly when they’re making work on you and you’re collaborating in that way. Yes? No?
Well, within the confines of the studio. I mean, the way we work in the studio, you’re not sitting down having tea with someone, talking about the finer points of life. It’s a very mission-oriented time. I’m kind of thinking back on when he made Eyes on You. Adin was the first thing he choreographed on me, actually, but I was with a partner, a much more experienced partner who had been choreographed on a lot, and I think in that experience I kind of just responded to the dynamic that was happening between the two of them, so I was like, “Oh, okay, I see how this is going here.” And then for Eyes on You, when he first started it, I think the very first rehearsal for that piece was the two of us in the studio with just each other. And that can be a really intense situation – one dancer, one choreographer, nobody else around. It’s very vulnerable for everyone. But I think we got over the initial thing of, “Okay, this is a little weird,” pretty quickly. Once I realized that it was funny – that there was a sense of humor to the piece – once I caught on to that, we had a blast.

Anne Mueller and Karl Vakili in Christopher Stowell's Adin, 2004. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

I come at it from a background in theatre, so first rehearsals are often, like, everyone sits around and talks about their feelings.
Nobody talks about their feelings in ballet. It’s the opposite of that. Not that we stuff them away, but –

But it’s a whole different ballgame.
A whole different ballgame.

What are three adjectives that describe Christopher’s personality to you?
Curious. “Creative” is so generic . . . I don’t want to say that. Thoughtful, without being overly analytical. That’s not an adjective, but –

No, I’m with you.
Okay. And then – funny. Clever. Clever, but in a humorous kind of way. Not like Sherlock Holmes. (Laughs)

Can that be the title of this article? “CHRISTOPHER STOWELL: Clever, But Not Like Sherlock Holmes.”
(Laughs) Yeah.

Are you an Anne fan? What do you think is Anne’s most recognizable, iconic role? Post your thoughts below in the comments!

More Celebrating Anne Stories | All About Anne | Tickets to Song & Dance

Your Daily Dance Break: In Honor of Spring, a Chinese Acrobat Butterfly Ballet

2011-03-28T13:54:00.000-07:00

Daily Dance Break: Fred and Ginger dance to Cole Porter

2011-03-25T14:39:00.000-07:00

Our dancers are in studio this week rehearsing Christopher's inspired Cole Porter romp "Eyes on You." In honor of their hard work, here's a look back at another pair of dancers taking on Cole Porter- in this case, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers!

Send Anne Off with a Smile!

2011-03-25T12:12:00.000-07:00

All week long, we've been sharing stories from Anne about her career, from her start at Washington Ballet to her work with the Trey McIntyre Project and her relationship with Christopher Stowell. Now it's your turn to share.
What was the first time you saw Anne dance?
What's your favorite Anne role?
A memory from your favorite Anne performance?
Best wishes as she transitions into the core artistic staff?
Share it here and we'll share your thoughts and wishes with Anne!

Your Daily Dance Break: Square Dance, the Lawrence Welk Version

2011-03-24T11:36:00.000-07:00

We'll be presenting Balanchine's idea of a Square Dance as part of our Song & Dance program in April. So we thought you might enjoy a peek at traditional square dance (as interpreted by the dancers on the Lawrence Welk Show in 1968)

Did you learn square dancing in P.E. as a kid?

Balanchine's First Square Dance Caller

2011-03-24T10:24:00.000-07:00

Gents go ‘round, come right back,
Make your feet go wickety-wack . . .

Crackerjack square dance caller Elisha Keeler was profiled in The New York Times and The New Yorker in 1957. Next thing you know, George Balanchine was making a new dance to the music of Baroque composers, prancing his City Ballet dancers through all kinds of stage geometry. He named it “Square Dance,” and invited Keeler to “call” it.

Keeler had only been to the ballet once in his life. He watched rehearsals, and with the help of his wife and kids, wrote the calls. “We asked him to say anything he wanted, as long as he didn’t use ballet terms,” said Balanchine.

Keeler was a colorful character, a horticulturist in his day job, famous for his way with African violets. He played piano, banjo, cello, trombone and harmonica, and his daddy was a caller before him. His family band—wife Lois on accordion, daughter Mollie on fiddle and son Kenny on banjo and trombone—often accompanied Keeler’s dances. They were known as the Happy Humdingers. Keeler made singing radio commercials too.

Keeler “sang” “Square Dance” every time it was performed at New York City Ballet from its premiere in 1957 through 1964. He called at over 2,600 festivals and conventions over his long life, but his family said “being part of the ballet was probably the high point of his calling career.” Wrote Time Magazine, “. . . when Keeler had twanged out his last call ("That is all; the dance is ended/ The music is finished; the caller's winded''), audiences cheered the blend of do-si-do and pas de deux.” Keeler passed away in 2005, at the age of 98.

Oregonians have a rare opportunity to see “Square Dance” its original form with OBT’s performances. Balanchine revised the ballet in 1976, and dropped the caller from the scenario.

(Photo: Portland violinist, composer and actor Tylor Neist will reprise Elisha Keeler’s role in the OBT performance of "Square Dance," part of the Song & Dance program playing in the Newmark in April)

Photo Above: Elisha Crofut Keeler, circa 1955

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The Life and Times of Anne Mueller Part Three: Fred the Duck

2011-03-23T16:21:00.000-07:00

OBT staff members Linda Besant and Claire Willett sat down with Principal Dancer Anne Mueller (who retires from the stage and transitions to our artistic staff in May) to interview her about her life and career. Over the next few days we’ll be sharing with you some of her stories and anecdotes – from her childhood as a touring ballet dancer, to the craziest photo shoot she ever worked on, to how she ended up living on a farm full of goats. Stay tuned for this behind-the-scenes peek at the life of one of OBT’s most engaging, colorful and unique personalities.

by Claire Willett

(This is a brief excerpt from Anne's performance as "Fred the Duck" in the Charles Moulton piece "Chickens," which premiered in 2001 at Oregon Ballet Theatre).

Petite and angular, with a striking face and a fascinatingly geometric body, Anne Mueller is a distinctive-looking woman even in her regular-person clothes. As an OBT Principal Dancer, it’s not unusual for her to be recognized on the street or in the grocery store by a ballet fan. But we got the scoop on the very first role at OBT that ever got Anne recognized in public . . . and it’s even crazier than you can imagine.

In 2001, OBT produced a “Battle of the Sexes” Choreographer’s Showcase featuring one program using all male choreographers and one using all female choreographers. Anne had previously danced in a piece by Charlie Moulton, called “Five,” which Anne says she regrets was only done once. “It was beautiful. Very aerobic,” she says. “Charlie’s style of choreographing was really unlike anything I’d experienced before . . . That was a huge growth experience for me.” She loved it so much that she jumped at the chance to perform in his next piece as part of the "Battle of the Sexes" at OBT two years later – without any idea what she was in for.

The piece, entitled “Chickens,” was originally created on White Oak Dance Project, who premiered it at the Joyce Theatre in New York. “They were for the most part not ballet dancers,” says Anne. “They were mostly modern dancers, so both thematically and vocabulary-wise, this piece was pretty out there.” The woman who traveled out to Portland to set the piece on OBT’s company informed Anne, “You’ve been precast as the duck.” “And I thought, ‘Oh, I’m the duck! That sounds like an important part,’” she laughs. “I was very excited to be the duck.”

Then the dancers watched a video of the piece, and, says Anne, “We just didn’t even know what to think.” But it grew on them quickly. “Though we’d been kind of terrified when we first initially saw the video, once we got into the world of this piece, we all just absolutely loved dancing it so much. It was a thrill to dance,” she says. “It was just a really fantastically challenging and off-the-wall piece.”

“Off-the-wall” seems to just about cover it. There’s no music – the ballet is set to a spoken-word piece by John Cale of the Velvet Underground, based on the story of the movie The Badlands. “The speaker talks about that movie and has a real affinity for Sissy Spacek, so that’s where some of the themes from the piece come from,” says Anne. “So Sissy was the male lead; he was a cowboy, but he wasn’t much of a cowboy. And his companion was me, Fred the Duck. And the deal with Fred the Duck was that he – he, she, I don’t even know – was a confused duck. I thought I was a chicken. I didn’t get that I was a duck so I tried to do lots of chicken things. I wouldn’t get in the water because the chickens wouldn’t get in the water.”

Anne wasn’t the only dancer who had to stretch outside her comfort zone to inhabit her zany role: dancer Matthew Boyes faced an entirely different challenge. “He had to hula-hoop in this piece at the very beginning,” says Anne, “and he had never learned to hula-hoop. So when we started learning this piece – which was like two weeks before the show so we were under some serious time pressure – he took the hula-hoop home and had to learn basically overnight. He came in the next day and he could barely walk, he was so sore.”

The show was wildly successful and audiences loved it. And because of Anne’s hard work in this wacky role, “People started to recognize me on the street,” she says. “They would say, ‘Hey, you’re Fred the Duck!’ Which was exciting – I had not really been recognized at all prior to dancing that role, and I thought it was just so fantastically ironic as a classically-trained ballet dancer that the role I was being recognized for was the role of Fred the Duck.”

Are you an Anne fan? What do you think is Anne’s most recognizable, iconic role? Post your thoughts below in the comments!

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The Life and Times of Anne Mueller Part Two: Alabama School of the Arts

2011-03-21T11:58:00.000-07:00

This is an image of Anne's teacher, Sonia Arova. You can check out a video of her dancing in Coppelia here.

Anne remembers: I’d started studying in the D.C. area at the Washington School of Ballet. My dad was in the military, and he got transferred to Atlanta. I was heartbroken that I would have to leave D.C. and I was not interested in moving my training. What I had loved about Washington School of Ballet was this sense of history and elegance and etiquette. I really loved that. It had a feeling like you were being prepared for the knighthood or something like that.

My dad did a lot of research during my training, and looked into the Alabama School of Fine Arts. He took me on an advance visit and I was initially very skeptical, but I agreed to audition.

I auditioned with Sonia Arova, who absolutely terrified me. She taught from a chair, and it sounds so cliché, she had a stick in hand and she would tap that stick on the floor to keep the rhythm.

She had some of the dancers in the school take the audition class with us. It was very hard to tell how old they were, they were small young women, and they were very, very, very good, and that intimidated the bejesus out of me. She gave this really hard class, and when it was time to pirouette, she would yell, every time she would yell, “Six pirouettes.”

I had never encountered anything quite like that, and I thought, “If I do not do six pirouettes, this woman is not going to let me into this school, and I think I really want to be in this school.” I tried very hard to do six pirouettes, and of course I wasn’t doing six, but I think I was maybe doing three. They might not have been good, but it was an interesting strategy.

What she was trying to get us to do was just go for more. All I was focusing on was what I was not accomplishing correctly, and I didn’t see what she had gotten me to accomplish in trying to do more. That was my first realization about Sonia and her training style.

I did get accepted into the Alabama School of Fine Arts and decided to go there. So in the eighth grade I moved away from home and into a dormitory. The facility was not glamorous at the time. The dance studios were in a converted warehouse. The dormitory building had been a sort of mental hospital for women in the 1950s and 60s, so it was a bit of a bleak place, it had bars on the windows.

We had an integrated schedule of dance classes and academics. Somewhere through my first year Sonia decided that I should take private lessons. It was a bit of a terrifying situation. You would be in your afternoon class and she would send someone to get you to go into the small studio with her. You would spend somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour, with no accompaniment, sometimes not even doing combinations, just practicing skills, really hard skills, over and over and over again. Every lesson was different, always on pointe, you never worked with Sonia in flat shoes.

The first day of school of my freshman year, I was sitting in my dorm room, and I got a call at the one of the pay phones in the hallway. Those were our only phones. I got on the phone, and Sonia said, “Anna.” She always called me Anna and in eight years I never corrected her that that wasn’t really my name. She said, “Come over here for a private lesson.”

I was crestfallen, it was the first day of school, I was not in good shape, but dutifully I marched myself over there and did my private lesson. The deal was that she wanted me to be Clara in The Nutcracker that year. It was a really technically demanding role for a young girl, on pointe, and she knew I needed a little extra skill building to be ready for it.

This was not for a school production, this was for the Alabama Ballet’s annual performances of Nutcracker. Any time the company would go on tour doing a larger production, students in the school got to go along provided that their grade point average was high enough, so that was a tricky thing that you had to maintain.
So I started touring with the Alabama Ballet in the eighth grade, and we would leave at Thanksgiving and be gone for two or three weeks, and tour continually up until we came back to Birmingham for the run of Nutcracker. There would be a couple of us in eighth or ninth grade and together we would have to get our school work done, figure out the finer points of like, geometry, on our own. So I would tour Nutcracker every year, and then starting in the tenth grade I starting touring other productions as well. At fifteen, I was already touring and performing a lot with a professional company.

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The Life and Times of Anne Mueller Part One: Napoli

2011-03-21T11:36:00.000-07:00

OBT staff members Linda Besant and Claire Willett sat down with retiring Principal Dancer Anne Mueller to interview her about her life and career. Over the next few days we’ll be sharing with you some of her stories and anecdotes – from her childhood as a touring ballet dancer, to the craziest photo shoot she ever worked on, to how she ended up living on a “nano-farm” with her husband and two goats. Enjoy these behind-the-scenes peeks at the life of one of OBT’s most engaging, colorful and unique personalities, beginning with these two tales from her student days.

(This is a quick video clip of the Danish National Ballet's production of Napoli, which Anne was invited to perform in as a student at the Washington Ballet.)

Dancing at the Kennedy Center — Napoli with the Royal Danish Ballet

Anne remembers: Once I started training seriously, I was living in the Washington, D.C. area, and I had started to study at the Washington School of Ballet.

One of the neatest things about living and studying dance in Washington is that the Kennedy Center brings in a large number of the world’s best ballet companies every year. As a student it’s a dreamy place to be because you get to see the best dancers in the world performing in a lot of different styles—American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Kirov Ballet.
Generally when a large company came to town and they needed kids, they would come to the Washington School of Ballet and say, “Do you have kids that can do this?”

So I had the amazing opportunity to be a part of the Royal Danish Ballet’s Napoli.

We were auditioned and I was absolutely delighted to be chosen as one of six or eight girls, I was twelve at the time, who actually got to dance in the production. Even more exciting than that, I got to dance with a little Danish boy who was also 12 years old. I had a crush on him before I even met him. (Coincidentally, I married a Dane.) We rehearsed for maybe two weeks and then we were in the theater, and we performed this amazing, historically significant ballet with impeccable dancers. I remember the dress I got to wear. It was green silk, and so beautiful.

We danced our portion. I don’t have any memory of being nervous about it, I was just so excited. After we danced we got to go up onto the bridge that was in the upstage part of the set and stand and watch the entire Napoli Pas de Six from the bridge, and throw paper flowers at the end. It was totally incredible to be watching dancers of that skill level from so close.

Actually, the current director of the Royal Danish Ballet, Nicolaj Hübbe, was still dancing with them at the time, before he went to NYCB. I remember really liking his dancing, and having a crush on him too. I think I followed him down the hall and took pictures of him.

The dancers of that company were so very nice and generous to us. We circulated our pointe shoes around to be signed. I’m certain my parents still have that pointe shoe somewhere, signed by a bunch of members of the Royal Danish Ballet.

I had seen lots of lavish productions, but being part of it, being on that stage was an entirely different matter. It was a magical experience.

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Christopher's Oregonian Profile

2011-03-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

In case you missed it, here is the link to Artistic Director Christopher Stowell's profile article in Sunday's Oregonian.

Here's an excerpt:

"Why all the Balanchine and Robbins works in OBT's repertoire?" Stowell says. "I think that these choreographers did so much to define and advance ballet in America that any company that aspires to a high level must perform their greatest works as central to the canon of this art form. Audiences deserve to see them, in the same way that classical music audiences deserve to hear Beethoven and Mozart."

Still, OBT is anything but a museum company. Stowell has created eight world premieres for the company, and he's commissioned new work from in-demand choreographers like Nicolo Fonte, Yuri Possokhov and Christopher Wheeldon, arguably the most sought-after dance maker in the world.

West says Stowell should be commended for taking risks with young and sometimes inexperienced choreographers, and that his background and relationships have helped him improve the programming at OBT.

"I think it needs to be said that Stowell has been able to program stuff Canfield couldn't because of the connections he developed during his long career as a dancer with San Francisco Opera Ballet and his pedigree," West says. "Kent and Francia were both in the New York City Ballet and directed Pacific Northwest Ballet for close to three decades. This gave (Stowell) contacts that enabled him to program three Robbins ballets, Paul Taylor's 'Company B,' three works by Christopher Wheeldon, who is a friend, even an Ashton ballet and a ton of Balanchine."

Read the whole article here.

The Real Black Swan: Dance Magazine Exposes the Controversial “Face-Replacement” Technology That Made a Ballerina Out of Natalie Portman

2011-03-17T10:17:00.000-07:00

by Claire Willett

If you’ve happened on Dance Magazine’s website lately – or if, like me, you have Facebook friends who are professional ballet dancers – then you may have seen Wendy Perron’s columns from last week and the week before about Sarah Lane, the ballet dancer whose body doubled for Natalie Portman in her award-winning performance as Nina in the recent film Black Swan. In the following video (caution: this contains both spoilers and some gross special effects), you can see a very cool montage of digitally-enhanced scenes from the movie with original plates overlaid by effects shots – adding feathers to Portman’s arms, erasing crew and lighting rigs in the background, color-correction, etc. One of these techniques is euphemistically titled “face replacement,” and it’s causing a major stir. Why? Because in all of the climatic moments of the movie where we see Nina in motion, it’s Sarah Lane doing the dancing. Her face has been digitally replaced with Portman’s. Watch the video here:

** One more warning, this video contains spoilers and some gross special effects **

Now, in her defense, this is not just Portman’s issue (though she may have been complicit, and I didn’t hear her thank or acknowledge Sarah Lane in her recent seventeen thousand acceptance speeches). This is a studio issue. This is a 100% Hollywood-generated fake storyline intended to create the illusion that an actress learned how to be a ballet dancer in a year with nothing but a little coaching and her own sheer chutzpah and determination. It’s shameless Oscar bait. I have my own feelings about the Academy’s constant trumpeting of big grandiose spectacle roles over the arguably more challenging task of bringing a subtle, relatable, ordinary character to life (but I haven’t seen The Kids Are All Right yet either so I’m not shilling for Annette Bening here).

Body doubles are nothing new in film; actors use them for scenes that fall outside their standard contract agreements (mostly things like stunts, motion-capture, nudity or sex scenes), or for any situation in which it might be cheaper and easier to use a double rather than pay your star. And certainly movie musicals have been openly dubbing the voices of non-singing stars for years – we all know that wasn’t really Audrey Hepburn singing “I Could Have Danced All Night,” right, guys? But my point is that in this film, the physicality of Nina’s dancing – the way her body expressed her emotions – was surely a not-at-all-insignificant component that voters evaluated in the process of handing Portman award after award after award. She was playing a ballet dancer. The quality of her dancing was under scrutiny. So aren’t we compelled to say that a good 50% of that Oscar statuette, if not more, is really Sarah Lane’s? Doesn’t Portman owe a sizable chunk of this success to the hardworking athlete whose body executed all of those tremendously complicated dance moves, who was asked by the studios to stop giving interviews and keep her mouth shut until Portman had an Oscar in her hand, and to be complicit in the creation of a lie (or “façade,” to use Lane’s own more polite word) that anyone who feels like it can just become a professional ballet dancer on a whim, because they want to try something new?

What do you think? Is this just Hollywood doing what Hollywood does – create gorgeous illusions to entertain us – or is this something more akin to plagiarism – one artist receiving credit for another artist’s work? What other movies do you know of that play the body-double/voice-double card? Weigh in below in the comments and let us know what you think.

Daily Dance Break: A Bit of Public Joy to Light Up Your Monday

2011-03-14T13:22:00.000-07:00

This flashmob took place in a German subway station as a fun stunt for a production of The Wizard of Oz that was being presented there. Check out the reactions of the people who stumbled into the midst of this "happening!"

Daily Dance Break: Nicolo Fonte Explains the Hows and Whys of Choreography

2011-03-11T12:02:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder what inspires a choreographer to create a particular piece in a particular way?

Here's a quick video from choreographer Nicolo Fonte (who's Left Unsaid will be performed as part of our Song & Dance program in April and who will be world premiering Petrouchka as part of our season opening performance next year) explaining the hows and whys of creating a specific piece of performance.

The beautiful moments of rehearsal dance are from his world premiere of Record of Joy for the Dutch National Ballet...

Feed the Arts!

2011-03-10T15:43:00.000-08:00

A vintage commercial dance break in honor of Burgerville's awesome promotion supporting Work for Art.

Eat at Burgerville today and they'll make a gift to the Regional Arts and Culture Council's (RACC) Work for Art program!

Fear No Music

2011-03-08T13:15:00.000-08:00

No one should ever fear music, but if you are especially curious and excited by it, I have an even to recommend.

Local chamber music group Fear No Music has a concert this coming Sunday, March 13, at the Aladdin Theater in Southeast Portland. FNM is known for their bold explorations into the area of new classical music, often seeking to take down the walls between genres, forms of art, and performers. For this concert, they were able to procure an entire evening's worth of work by Gabriel Prokofiev (grandson of Sergei), who is not only an esteemed composer in his own right but also a DJ. One of his pieces is called "Sleeveless Scherzo", created for solo violin and dancer, and I will be performing it with violinist Paloma Griffin. Paloma and I have devised an interpretation of the piece that I think the audience will find really interesting-- she and I certainly are compelled by it!

The entire program should be fascinating-- Gabriel will be spinning throughout, as well as at the end of the evening-- so I encourage everyone to come experience it for themselves.

More information and tickets are here:
www.fearnomusic.org

Daily Dance Break: Ginger Rogers Proves that Dance is Not Just a Young Woman's Game

2011-03-08T10:57:00.000-08:00

Dance is hard on the body, and many people's professional dance careers sunset by their early thirties. But that doesn't mean that dance can't continue to be a vital part of life throughout your life.

To prove this, the esteemed Ginger Rogers performed this salsa benefit in her EIGHTIES. Something for us all to aspire to!

The Rite of Spring - "Are They Lifeguards?"

2011-03-07T10:50:00.000-08:00

A very special Daily Dance Break created by Steven Houser and Adrian Fry for OBT's end of the year video after the world premiere of "The Rite of Spring" in 2009.

Your Daily Dance Break: In Honor of the Red Cross

2011-03-02T11:05:00.000-08:00

Today's Daily Dance Break is in honor of the thousands of children living with HIV that the Red Cross serves each year. This is a video from a benefit performance for the British Red Cross, featuring community children dancing.

You can support the American Red Cross at this Friday's performance of The Stravinsky Project.

Just wear RED to the performance and you'll get to purchase 2 for 1 tickets to The Stravinsky Project at the door. Plus $3 from each ticket you purchase will go to benefit the American Red Cross.

Daily Dance Break: First Position. Harder than it Looks.

2011-03-01T14:00:00.000-08:00

In honor of our newest dancers at our school, here is a gentle reminder that first position is not as easy as it looks on stage...

The Stravinsky Project is Open! What Did You Think?

2011-02-28T16:41:00.000-08:00

We had a wonderful opening weekend performance for The Stravinsky Project, along with a glowing review from Martha Ullman West at The Oregonian. Here's an excerpt:

Stravinsky rocks, and so does Oregon Ballet Theatre. That was abundantly clear on Saturday night when the company opened its spring concerts at the Keller with an all-Stravinsky program that included reprises of Yuri Possokhov's charming "Firebird" and Christopher Stowell's sophisticated neo-classical "Rite of Spring," with the thoroughly risky " Stravinsky Project" as the centerpiece. Read the full review.

The Willamette Week was also a big fan of the performance, saying:

Artistic Director Christopher Stowell’s version of The Rite of Spring concludes the program... It’s a mesmerizing piece, propelled by sharp angles, sudden directional shifts and the ferocity of lead dancer Anne Mueller’s attack. Mueller retires after this program and her performance alone is worth the trip, although the entire project has much to recommend, artistic departures included. Perhaps Stravinsky would approve. Read the full review.

Did you see the performance this weekend? What did you think? Share your thoughts about the show in the comments below.

Daily Dance Break: Congratulations to Natalie Portman

2011-02-28T14:48:00.000-08:00

In honor of Natalie Portman's best actress Oscar win, here is that beautiful/terrifying moment when she turns into, well, a Black Swan...

Daily Dance Break: Kinetic Sculpture

2011-02-25T12:00:00.001-08:00

Do you need the human body for it to be dance? Or could these mesmerizing, shifting steel forms be considered to be "dancing?"

Kinetic Art - Dynamic Structure 29117 from Willem van Weeghel on Vimeo.

My Own First Firebird

2011-02-24T16:39:00.000-08:00

by OBT Historian Linda Besant

(This is an excerpt from Béjart's Firebird, performed by the National Ballet of China for its 50th anniversary in 2009)

I was twenty-five and all by myself in Budapest when I saw my first ballet performance. I had worked as a music teacher in the Beaverton schools for four years after college, pinching every penny, living on Ramen noodles and sharing an old house in Tigard with four other young people (rent and utilities--$32 a month), saving for a fifteen-month grand adventure. In June of 1972, I set out solo around the world, with my bicycle, $3,000 in traveler's checks, and a Pan Am air mileage plane ticket.

By January, having sold my bike in Switzerland when it got too snowy to keep riding, I was in Hungary. I stayed in the old castle above the Danube that had been pressed into service as a hostel, with hundreds of Hungarians who were living there, waiting years for apartments of their own, their possessions in boxes under the beds. We communicated in sentences patched together with whatever English, German and French we had in common. Gradually, they led me to understand that the thing to do in Budapest if you could scrape together the money was go to the rush ticket box office in the afternoon and wait in line for the ticket drawing. Who knew what unsold seat in a theater somewhere in town might be yours for what, to me, was about 35 cents?

So I found myself one afternoon in a line quite like the morning lines for bread. When my turn came, my luck landed me a back-row-of-the-highest-tier ticket to see Maurice Béjart's Ballet of the 20th Century perform an iconic double bill: Stravinsky's Firebird and The Rite of Spring. What a wild introduction to ballet!

Here's an excerpt from Béjart's 1959 Rite of Spring, filmed in 1970.

Tell me: What was your first Firebird?

More posts about The Stravinsky Project | Buy Tickets to The Stravinsky Project

2011-02-24T12:07:00.001-08:00

Today's Daily Dance Break is inspired by the snow on the ground in Portland.

It's the "snow dance" from Memoirs of a Geisha. Enjoy!

Your Daily Dance Break: Trey McIntyre's Stylishly Sexy Rite of Spring

2011-02-23T11:27:00.000-08:00

Check out choreographer Trey McIntyre's interpretation of The Rite of Spring.

You might remember Trey from the Snoop Dogg inspired "Speak" which is returning as part of our upcoming Song and Dance program.

Enjoy!

The Rite of Spring (The Engagement) - excerpt from Trey McIntyre Project on Vimeo.

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The Rite Riot: The Ballets Russes and The Rite of Spring

2011-02-23T10:49:00.000-08:00

By Linda Besant

On May 9, 1909, dancers who would come to be known as Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes gave their first performance at the Théatre du Chatelet in Paris. By the time the company dissolved upon Diaghilev’s death in 1929, the “Russian Ballet” had given work to Europe’s best dancers, choreographers, composers and artists, revitalized ballet throughout the Western world, and amassed an astonishing avant garde repertoire.

Diaghilev himself was an impresario. He created through others, bringing together artists of all disciplines to produce integrated, revolutionary works of art. “A list of his collaborators,” wrote Arnold Haskell, “reads like an index to the cultural history of the first three decades of the century.” The list encompasses composers such as Debussy, Prokofiev and Ravel; choreographers from Fokine to Nijinsky and Balanchine; and artists like Picasso, Matisse and Dali.

Le Sacre du Printemps, known in English as The Rite of Spring, was the landmark work of the Ballets Russes season in 1913. Composer Igor Stravinsky and Nicholas Roerich, the painter and amateur archeologist who designed the scenery, set forth an ancient tale of the ritual sacrifice of a chosen maiden to the spring gods of fertility.
Stravinsky had composed Firebird for Diaghilev in 1910, and Petrushka in 1911, but he broke all bounds with Le Sacre du Printemps. “I tried,” he said, to evoke “the mystery and surge of the creative power of spring . . . like the whole earth cracking.” Lydia Sokolova, who danced in the first production, wrote, “To express the dread, hope and frenzy of these brutish folk, Stravinsky made a music whose rhythms, trembling, pulsing, flickering, thudding and crashing with a maniac piston beat, registered their animal emotions.”

Diaghilev assigned Le Sacre du Printemps to his favored choreographer for the 1913 season, Vaslav Nijinsky, the 24-year-old classical dancer worshipped across the continent for his magnetic presence and sensational jumps. Nijinsky had created L’Apres-midi d’un faune, the scandalous success of the Ballets Russes 1912 season, a dreamlike and erotic meditation that bore no resemblance to classical ballet. With Sacre, Nijinsky ran even further from ballet’s balance and symmetry. “Really,” he said, “I begin to have horror of the very word ‘grace’; ‘grace’ and ‘charm’ make me feel seasick . . . my own inclinations are ‘Primitive’.

Here's a clip from The Joffrey Ballet's recreation of the original 1913 choreography:

As the video above shows, Nijinsky’s choreography was raw and weighted to the earth. “The dancers trembled, shook, shivered, stamped; jumped crudely and ferociously, circled the stage in wild khorovods,” wrote Lynn Garafola. It took 120 rehearsals for the dancers to encompass the utterly foreign demands of Nijinsky’s movement and Stravinsky’s polyrhythms. “The girls used to be running round with little bits of paper in their hands, in a panic, quarrelling with each other about whose count was right and whose wrong,” Sokolova remembered.

The public response to Le Sacre du Printemps “was exactly what I wanted,” Diaghilev told Stravinsky after the premiere on May 29, 1913—the audience at the Théatre des Champs-Elysées rioted. Valentine Gross, who was present that night, described the melee: “The theatre seemed to be shaken by an earthquake. It seemed to shudder. People shouted insults, howled and whistled, drowning the music. There was slapping and even punching.” Stravinsky escaped backstage, where Nijinsky was screaming counts wildly from the wings. Conductor Pierre Monteux continued the performance as if nothing were happening. Years later, Stravinsky wrote about Sacre, “A method is replaced; a tradition is carried forward to produce something new.”

Critical response at the time ranged from “epileptic fits, absurd dancing,” to “oddly impressive.” One paper defended the artists’ right to experiment. Looking back, historian Lynn Garafola wrote that in Sacre, Nijinsky showed “that ballet could generate styles of expression as powerfully imagined, deeply personal, and vitally contemporary as those of the other arts.” For the rest of its existence, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes continued to generate forward-thinking ballets, circling back to its roots in 1928 with George Balanchine’s newly classical Apollo.
Nijinsky’s choreography for Le Sacre du printemps was reconstructed by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer in the 1980s for the Joffrey Ballet. Since 1913, choreographers across the spectrum of dance have created more than 60 interpretations of Stravinsky’s score, serving as a potent symbol of Diaghilev’s legacy.

More posts about The Stravinsky Project | Buy Tickets to The Stravinsky Project

Notes:

Dancing for Diaghilev: The memoirs of Lydia Sokolova, ed. Richard Buckle. John
Murray Publishers, 1960. p. 42

Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, Lynn Garafola. Oxford University Press, 1989. pgs. 68-75
International Dictionary of Ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps, Jody Leader. St. James Press, 1993. pgs 1231-1233

Nijinsky, Richard Buckle. Simon and Schuster, 1971. p. 300

Nijinsky: God of the Dance, Derek Parker. Equation, 1988. pgs 143-147

wikipedia

Your Daily Dance Break: Paul DeStrooper interprets Firebird

2011-02-21T12:32:00.000-08:00

Paul Destrooper, who is quoted in our post about the creation of OBT's Firebird and was Prince Ivan in the premiere of OBT's version, retired from OBT at the end of the 2006-07 season to become artistic director of Ballet Victoria in Canada. He has choreographed his own Firebird. See what he's been up to in this excerpt:

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"It's Exhilarating to be Someone's Creative Instrument" : The Creation of OBT's Firebird

2011-02-21T12:14:00.000-08:00

From the very beginning of his time with OBT, Artistic Director Christopher Stowell intended that the company would develop a repertoire of works “to scores written specifically for ballet. For the initial effort in that direction,” he says, “I asked Yuri Possokhov to choreograph Stravinsky’s Firebird in 2004. He felt a bit confined at first. He had never thought of attempting it, and didn’t even like the music much at that point.”

“Yes,” Yuri elaborates, “I want to say I never liked the music before. Now I love it. When you listen to music and say immediately you don’t like it, it doesn’t mean anything. When you know it well, you have the right to say you love it or hate it.” As Yuri’s Firebird developed, he enjoyed having the foundation of the narrative for his choreography.

Says Christopher, “External restrictions can provide helpful parameters.”

During the 2003-04 season, Yuri was still a principal dancer with San Francisco Ballet. He had to choreograph Firebird in December of 2003, when he wasn’t performing. Rather than being able to choose his own schedule, he had to work with the dancers he could get on any given day, structured around OBT’s Nutcracker performances. Like many ballet situations, they had to work when they had small windows of opportunity. (As the great choreographer George Balanchine said, “…inspiration, it’s not anything that’s all of a sudden, like a stomach ache. There’s no such thing as inspiration. You have to work.”)

Yuri didn’t have the luxury of being able to show up unprepared; he created the entire Firebird in three weeks. He had gone over and over the music before coming to the studio.

Historian Lynn Garafola has observed that, “Between choreographer and dancers exists a special kind of intimacy. Each gives to the other; each reveals the other; each needs the other to complete himself as an artist.” That special intimacy developed as Firebird evolved.

Susan Gladstone, who was ballet master at the time, described “Yuri’s larger-than-life personality and infectious enthusiasm. He certainly cultivated an environment in which the dancers wanted to push beyond their limits. In turn, inspired by OBT’s dancers, Yuri came up with seemingly impossible steps that, after a few days’ work, became not only possible, but beautiful.”

Paul DeStrooper, who was Ivan in one of the 2004 casts, said “Yuri demands a lot—he’s a dancer and he knows what’s possible. He would say, ‘I want you to do something like this,’ then demonstrate loosely and let you work it out. He gave you time to get it in a comfort zone that’s in the aesthetic he wanted. He’s attuned to the musicality, so you can go with the melody and phrasing of the piece, not only the counts.”

Said Alison Roper, who danced the Firebird in one cast in 2004, “It’s exhilarating to be someone’s creative instrument. Some of Yuri’s movement is narrative of what’s happening in the story, without being mime. In the pas de deux between the Firebird and Ivan, there are ‘toss-lifts,’ like she’s trying to fly away. Yuri would give us something like that and say, ‘Just do, enjoy yourself. Oh, I love that.’”

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It's a bird, it's a plane...

2011-02-17T12:34:00.001-08:00

No, it's Stravinsky superheroes!

Yesterday we had a rehearsal in costume for The Stravinsky Project. Much work still needs to be done in all areas, but it is definitely starting to come together.

We had the pianists in the studio for Rite of Spring yesterday which was a lot of fun. I've have worked with both Susan and Carol (aka The Good Doctor, who has incidentally written a book titled "Untethered" available on the Amazon Kindle store) many times in the past and always enjoy their skill and artistry. It's mind-boggling to me that any individual(s) can make such intentionally chaotic sounds come out of any instrument. If you haven't heard the double-piano score I highly recommend you listen to it; It somehow feels even more complex than the orchestral version.

That's all the news from me today. I've got to go be a tall couple in Rite.

- Steven

*Photo Credit: Thyra Hartshorn.

Location:SE Morrison St,Portland,United States

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LOOKING BACK AT THE FIRST FIREBIRD

2011-02-17T12:11:00.000-08:00

by OBT Historian Linda Besant

The original Firebird premiered in 1910 for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris. For nearly twenty years, from 1909 to 1929, Diaghilev’s company of primarily Russian-trained dancers performed radical new ballets that gave equal expression to all the arts involved.

Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes were among the greatest fruits of an extraordinary era. Historian Nina Lederman described “a great diaspora of intellectuals” to Paris in the early 1900s. A “generous portion of the world’s great artists” swirled through, and Diaghilev showered them with opportunities to collaborate in creating exciting dance, productions called ballets that actually had more in common with what we now term “modern dance.”

(For example, the original Firebird princesses danced in bare feet and Ivan walked naturally, not like a danseur noble; the Firebird herself did not use turnout, and Kachei’s monsters cavorted with grotesque jumps and squats.)

Firebird was among the first creations of the Ballets Russes. Michel Fokine was Diaghilev’s chosen choreographer during this period, but Stravinsky was Diaghilev’s second choice to compose Firebird. (First choice Liadov did not deliver in time.) Stravinsky was paid 100 rubles for the score, about the price of a Diet Coke in St. Petersburg these days.

Stravinsky and Fokine worked closely together on the ballet, weaving together elements from several Russian folk tales into a story with old symbols but a new outcome—total liberation from evil. Fokine described their process, improvising and refining toward the finished score and choreography:

“Stravinsky visited me with his first sketches and basic ideas, he played them for me, I demonstrated the scenes to him . . . When Ivan appears at the garden wall . . .
Stravinsky played, and I interpreted the role . . . substituting the piano for the wall.
I climbed over it, jumped down from it, and crawled, fear-struck, looking around my living room . . . Stravinsky, watching, accompanied me with patches of the melodies . . .
playing mysterious tremolos as background.”

For his part, in the autobiography Chronicles of My Life, Stravinsky wrote how his musical ideas “worked themselves loose” by improvisation at the piano. He likened improvising composers to a restless animals—“they feel the desire to seek for something.”

Of his choreography for Firebird, Fokine wrote,

“I completely excluded the stereotyped hand pantomime and ballet gesticulations for the development of the plot on the stage and expressed the story with actions and dance.”

Monsters crawled and rolled rather than advancing in symmetrical lines; the Firebird twisted and fluttered to escape from Ivan. (Fokine said her “arms would now open up like wings, now hug the torso and head, in complete contradiction of all ballet arm positions.")

Firebird was told non-stop—not once did the story pause for displays of virtuoso dancing.

Tamara Karsavina danced the first Firebird. Anna Pavlova was slated for the role, but found the music incomprehensible and refused to dance it. The great Vaslav Nijinsky wanted to premiere the Firebird role en pointe, but Diaghilev did not permit it. Fokine himself was the first Ivan.

Critic John Martin wrote that the original Firebird “ . . . was a magical work in its day, unlike anything we had ever seen.”

The Ballets Russes premiered Firebird, Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring in almost yearly succession between 1910 and 1913, all composed by Stravinsky. As Lederman wrote,

“They established the one-act ballet as an important new form in music theater. Stravinsky… is the age … a force of utmost immediacy that has pierced our ears, extended their range, re-formed our appetites.”

Oregon Ballet Theatre is pleased to have generated its own Firebird and The Rite of Spring with acclaimed choreographers Yuri Possokhov and Christopher Stowell. With the commission of Nicolo Fonte to create a new Petrouchka for OBT’s 2011-12 season, the company will complete an historic trilogy.

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Notes:

Stravinsky in the Theatre, Ed. Nina Lederman. Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1949.
Lecture: Stravinsky’s Firebird, Joni Steshko. Portland State University, 2003.
Fokine: memoirs of a ballet master, Michel Fokine. Trans. Vitale Fokine. 1969
Stravinsky, Frank Onnen. Continental Books Company, Stockholm, 1958.
Dance Classics: A Viewers Guide to the Best-Loved Ballets and Modern Dances, Nancy
Reynolds and Susan Reimer-Torn, a capella books, 1991.
Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, Boris Kochno. Harper and Row, 1970.

Your Daily Dance Break: A Vintage Firebird

2011-02-17T12:01:00.000-08:00

In honor of our upcoming production of Firebird, check out this video of the Royal Ballet's Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes, who was said to have been unsurpassed by any living dancer. This is an excerpt of the end of the ballet. It is based on Fokine's original choreography from 1910.

Our historian, Linda Besant, remarks that you can see from this video "how formal and
patterned Fokine's choreography was, though it was revolutionary at
the time." You can see "how Yuri Possokhov remained faithful to the
Essence in the Firebird he made for OBT, but has so much more choreographic
range and freedom in this day and age."

Got your tickets yet? Opening night is nearly sold out, but there are great seats available for the other performances here.

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Surprise!

2011-02-15T13:32:00.001-08:00

Nap time in studio 1.

Just kidding, it's Firebird rehearsal.

I bet you all weren't expecting to hear from me again... But lo and behold, here I am.

Much has been going on here at 818 SE 6th. We're deep into rehearsals for our Stravinsky rep, and speaking for myself, it's such a nice change from all the classical ballet we did in the first half of the season.

Two highlights for me this rep are getting to revisit one of my favorite roles, Katschei, and being a part of The Stravinsky Project.

I first learned Firebird as a student in the school when Yuri created it, so coming back to this ballet a 3rd time definitely has a homey feel to it. Although, look for some big changes, most notably the replacement of children spiders with adult male dancers. The inferno is even more action packed this time around.

I feel very fortunate to have been involved with the creation on The Stravinsky Project from the beginning of the choreographic process last June in Caldera. It's been great to see collaboration take shape among the diverse group of choreographers. The piece started out with having each choreographer (or group of choreographers in the case of BodyVox's Jamie and Ashley) create their own section with some space at the beginning and end for blending. But now I have seen people add blending into the mix of their existing sections as choreographic changes, or even adding entire sections of dance that they would have otherwise never made.

Yesterday was our first time with all the choreographers and musicians in the room and one of the choreographers made a suggestion about someone else's section and I was really taken aback because that always seems like a boundary not to be crossed in the normal creation process, so even as a dancer this has been a growing experience in watching artists interact with each other in a new way. Very cool.

On a final note, I know my biggest hurdle to overcome in blogging is deciding what to write about, so if you have ANY questions please send them in. Who knows, it may inspire a great blog.

See you in the theater,
Steven

PS - Be sure to come to Dance Talks this Sunday at PNCA, most of the artists involved in The Stravinsky Project will be there and I'm sure it will be very interesting. More info is on the website here.

Location:SE Morrison St,Portland,United States

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Your Daily Dance Break: Christopher Wheeldon Talks with The Guardian

2011-02-15T12:32:00.000-08:00

Check out this video interview (with great snippets of his choreographic style) that Christopher Wheeldon did with the Guardian in advance of the premiere of his Morphoses.

Wheeldon's piece, "Liturgy," will be featured as part of our Chromatic Quartet program in the Newmark next spring.

The best seats for that program will go to our season subscribers. You can subscribe online today right here.

Your Daily Dance Break: A Puppet Petroushka

2011-02-10T16:02:00.000-08:00

The original Petrouchka was a puppet at a carnival who discovered he had a soul and fell in love with a ballerina bimbo. It didn't end well.

Our 2011 production of Petrouchka is a world premiere adaptation from Nicolo Fonte that may or may not involve an actual puppet. But that doesn't mean we can't enjoy this creepy puppet interpretation of Stravinsky's Petrouchka.

Enjoy!

P.S. 2011/2012 Season Subscriptions are on sale Monday and start at just $71. Call 503.2BALLET for tickets!

Your Daily Dance Break: The Bolshoi Does Giselle

2011-02-09T12:41:00.000-08:00

For your enjoyment, and in honor of our just announced 2011/2012 season, here is a grand pas from Giselle, performed by Natalia Besmertnova of the Bolshoi Ballet.

The best seats for Giselle will go to season subscribers. Become one here.

Your Daily Dance Break: Lucille Ball Takes Ballet

2011-02-08T14:06:00.000-08:00

Stravinsky Conducts Firebird

2011-02-08T12:13:00.000-08:00

Take a minute or 3 to enjoy the master conducting his own work... here's some rare footage of the 82 year old Igor Stravinsky conducting Firebird.

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The Bad Boys of Classical:

2011-02-07T13:48:00.000-08:00

Is 21^st-century wunderkind Nico Muhly the rightful heir to Stravinsky’s legacy?

By Claire Willett

Igor Stravinsky

Nico Muhly

The Game-Changer

“One spring evening in 1913 the intelligentsia of pre-war Paris gathered at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées to see & hear a sensational new ballet. The ballet, put on by famed Russian Impresario Serge Diaghilev, was something to see: Diaghilev's idea of how primitive man got ritually excited, come springtime. The accompanying music, a boisterous, tom-tomming, banshee-wailing symphonic hullabaloo by Music's No. 1 Bad Boy, Igor Stravinsky, had even more oomph than the ballet . . . [He] found himself the most influential composer of his generation. To younger composers [The Rite of Spring] became music's Declaration of Independence.”

--TIME Magazine, March 1940

The 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring has gone down in history as one of classical music’s greatest scandals. From the first bassoon notes, the Parisians in attendance were beside themselves; stories abound (some historically verified, some probably urban legend) of celebrity guests storming out of the theatre, hooting and hollering from the galleries, fights breaking out in the audience, Stravinsky escaping through a basement window to dodge the rioting crowds. “One English critic described it as ‘a threat against the foundations of our tonal institutions,’ declaring that it should have been dedicated to Dr. Crippen, a dentist celebrated for murdering his wife, cutting her body in pieces.” (TIME Magazine 1940) But whether the stories are apocryphal or not, there is no denying that posterity has kept Rite of Spring a fresh, relevant, and vital piece of music, even in the 21^st century. “If you listen to it, it’s amazing it’s nearly 100 years old,” says Evan Lewis of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. “Other things happening in 1913 include the invention of the crossword puzzle and the modern zipper. It’s funny to think that something from 1913 is still considered ‘modern.’ Woodrow Wilson was president, for goodness sake.”

Yes, there will only ever be one Stravinsky.

But like every other genre-defying artist since the earliest days of Western civilization, the cultural world is constantly champing at the bit to designate an heir-apparent; there’s always some young up-and-comer to be dubbed “the next Chekhov,” “the next Picasso,” or “the next John Lennon.” And because Stravinsky is so quintessentially, well, Stravinsky, we’re hesitant to play that game. So all we’ll say is: if you find Stravinsky interesting and engaging (the man and the music), we recommend you look into 29-year-old Nico Muhly, who might just be the hardest-working young composer you’ve never heard of.

The Genre-Bender

“Talking about genres is [pointless]. Pretend your mom is from India and your dad is from Iceland or wherever, and you move to New York and you’re just a young family trying to make it work and you make dinner, you have kids, and whenever people come over they talk about it being fusion-y. ‘Ohh, this is, like, India meets Iceland,’ and you’re all like, ‘No, it’s just what we like making for the kids.’”

--Nico Muhly

Nico Muhly (profiled here in two hugely entertaining interviews with New York Magazine in 2007 and the New Yorker in 2008 was born in rural Vermont in 1981 to an artist mother and filmmaker father, and grew up traveling the world with his globetrotting parents. Now splitting his time between New York and Iceland, he is one of the classical world’s rising stars, with a trajectory (and a personality) that seems to echo Stravinsky’s. He frequently collaborates or consults with pop stars and indie bands (“Bad string arrangements in rock music are a blight on all of our ears”), and like Stravinsky before him, bodes well to be a classical music megastar before 30. He is the youngest composer ever commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera (Two Boys, his collaboration with librettist Craig Lucas, is based on the true story of a British murder case from the late 1990s). Muhly shares Stravinsky’s diversity of musical influences; though his day job involves working in a digital sound studio for composer Phillip Glass, his passion is 400-year-old Anglican liturgical music. In his wry, witty 2007 essay in the U.K. Guardian, “Choral Sex,” he talks about finding himself alienated from the classical music traditions he was taught as a young student, and discovering a more immediate emotional connection to music from centuries earlier . . . a sentiment that echoes Stravinsky’s saying that “It's one of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.”

“An Unclassifiable Musical Voice”

“Stravinsky never stopped adapting his style,” Lewis says. “He was always striving, always innovating.” The composer’s stylistic diversity is well-known (to the point of accusations from critics that his body of work had no consistency), ranging from his compositions for the Ballets Russe (Firebird, Petrushka, Rite of Spring) to his neo-classical period (shifting away from large ballet orchestras towards piano and chamber works) to the adoption of twelve-tone/atonal music later in life. Muhly, whose career is already similarly varied, has composed everything from film scores (including The Reader, which earned star Kate Winslet a Best Actress Oscar), to settings of 17^th-century Anglican choral music, to arrangements for Icelandic pop singer Bjork. One of the tracks on his album Mothertongue blends an English folk ballad with the sounds of a pair of butcher’s knives scraping against each other, a recording of whistling Icelandic wind, and the sound of raw whale flesh slopping around a bowl. Another includes music looped over the voice of his friend singing strings of words, numbers and addresses. Both were surprisingly witty: Stravinsky’s “Greeting Prelude” is a clever reorchestration of “Happy Birthday,” while Muhly made waves with a song cycle based on Strunck & White’s writing manual The Elements of Style, performed at the New York Public Library. “What I really like about both composers,” says Lewis, “is their ability to write self-aware, difficult & intellectually complex music (Muhly’s By All Means, Stravinsky’s Agon), while still being able to compose deeply affecting and beautiful music (Muhly’s Senex puerum poratbat, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms). They prove that a wicked and probing mind can also have an earnest, thoughtful, pious side—both are merely different aspects of a larger and interesting and unclassifiable musical voice.”

Stravinsky tells us how he really feels about film music:

PART 1

PART 2

TIME Magazine Profile on Stravinsky Written By Philip Glass

Muhly’s Hilarious and Awesome Blog

Download OBT's favorite Stravinsky and Muhly music

IGOR & NICO SOUND OFF ON . . .

The creative process

“The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.” – Igor

When asked, “How do you compose?”: “I’m a pack rat; I make these little piles of documents, a lot of documents – very little music paper involved, it’s all much later. It’s images, it’s drawings, it’s numbers, it’s schemes, it’s food, it’s almost never music.” – Nico

Film scores

“Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.” - Igor

People often ask me if it’s some sort of dream to be involved in the movie business, but it’s not really. I’m not an enormous movies fan. I feel like I have something better to do for two hours. [Most film scores are] just explicit manipulation.” – Nico

The music they DON’T like

“Every couple of years someone sues someone else for having ripped off their song, and I always follow those cases very intently. Now, it’s Joe Satriani v Coldplay, which is hilarious. The thing with Coldplay is: the reason their music is so successful is that it sounds like you’ve heard it before anyway. So, it’s almost like a constant intellectual copyright violation.” – Nico

“Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune.” – Igor

The freedom of artistic constraint

“One of the hardest things about writing music now is that structure is politically loaded, thanks in part to everybody's bad attitude in the 60s and 70s . . . I know that there’s this belief that structural knowledge can be creatively limiting, but I think the exact opposite.” – Nico

“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.” – Igor

Knowing when to stop

“Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.” – Igor

“The biggest question for me has always been, always, whatever I’m doing: is this, this thing I’m working on, is it preferable to silence? If someone tells me to write twelve minutes for orchestra, whatever I make had better to be so great that it deserves to exist. If people could spend twelve minutes sitting around in their house and have a better time, then I’ll cut it. You know, a lot of music is not preferable to silence.” – Nico

Inspiration from the past

“My love for Thomas Weelkes was like a childish celebrity infatuation. If the internet had existed, I would have been running the Weelkes fan site and moderating the message boards. There was something about his 400-year-old music that felt so right in the throat and brain; I would have followed him on tour and lit my lighter during When David Heard. I'd have told all my friends that he had written the Ninth Service for me.” – Nico

“It's one of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us.” – Igor

Personal indulgences

“My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.” – Igor

“I only buy expensive food. If you’re paying an exorbitant amount of money for something, chances are it’s good.” – Nico

Don’t overthink it

“The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.” – Igor

“Talking about genres is [pointless]. Pretend your mom is from India and your dad is from Iceland or wherever, and you move to New York and you’re just a young family trying to make it work and you make dinner, you have kids, and whenever people come over they talk about it being fusion-y. ‘Ohh, this is, like, India meets Iceland,’ and you’re all like, ‘No, it’s just what we like making for the kids.’” - Nico

Instinct

“One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.” – Igor

“My mother goes to the store not knowing what to cook, she’ll just buy the stuff that looks good and mixes it all together into something amazing. And that’s kind of how you have to be, a mix of instinct and insight. We might be eating this cauliflower anchovy thing; even if it sounds f***ed up you know it’ll be genius by accident.” – Nico

Trends in music

“Anytime you read a sentence about classical music with the formula ‘_______ is dead’ it’s almost always written by some kind of revolutionary or reactionary or crazy person. My response to this — and really to most meta-figurations about music — is to put my fingers in my ears and apply myself to the business of continuing to write good music.” – Nico

“Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of Mach 3.” – Igor

The Stravinsky Project opens February 26th at the Keller Auditorium.

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Stravinsky Costume Renderings

2011-02-02T10:00:00.000-08:00

Last time we talked about all the amazing collaborators that are coming together to bring The Stravinsky Project to the stage. Choreographers, composers, designers - when you count them all up we have over a half dozen for this one world premiere.

As promised, we are revealing some of the original costume renderings for The Stravinsky Project from designer Morgan Walker. Feast your eyes on these beauties...

First of all, I am in love with these drawings. The sketches are so gorgeous it reminds me of my favorite time during each episode of Project Runway when everyone hunkers down for a mere seven minutes and produces amazing sketches like it's nothing. Also, these are the most avant-garde costumes to come out of the OBT costume shop in some time, maybe ever. Second runner up might be these from Julia Adam's Angelo, which featured removable felt panels - but they are still pretty standard compared to these Stravinsky renderings.

Just as fascinating are the references I'm seeing in the drawings: can-can girls, kits, hoop skirts... superheros? What else do you see?

The Stravinsky Project runs February 26 to March 5 at Portland's Keller Auditorium.

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In studio with "The Stravinsky Project"

2011-01-31T12:32:00.001-08:00

The Stravinsky Project is right around the corner and everyone in the building is especially curious about how the new work, (also titled) The Stravinsky Project is going to look. The piece is a collaboration between Choreographers Jamey Hampton and Ashley Roland (BodyVox), Rachel Tess (Rumpus Room Dance), OBT's own Anne Mueller PLUS original live electronic music composition by Heather Perkins (Water Dog Studio) and costume design by artist and professor Morgan Walker (PNCA).

Oh right, and it is set to Stravinsky's music. That's one doozy of a collaboration.

Here are some peeks at how this has been playing out in the studio.

L-R: Brian Simcoe, Christian Squires, Alison Roper, Steven Houser,
Candace Bouchard and Lucas Threefoot in The Stravinsky Project rehearsal.
Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

L-R: Brian Simcoe, Alison Roper, Candace Bouchard,
Lucas Threefoot and Christian Squires in The Stravinsky Project rehearsal.
Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

Choreographer Jamey Hampton and Candace Bouchard
in The Stravinsky Project rehearsal. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

Choreographer Jamey Hampton (foreground) and Alison Roper
in The Stravinsky Project rehearsal. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

Choreographer Jamey Hampton, Alison Roper and company
in The Stravinsky Project rehearsal. Photo by Blaine Truitt Covert.

So what do you think, does it look like you'd expect?

See the finished work in The Stravinsky Project opening February 26th.

Next up, costume design renderings...

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5 Fun Facts About Igor Stravinsky

2011-01-21T10:34:00.001-08:00

Facts compliments of Maestro DePonte

1. At one point, Stravinsky lived in a Swiss hotel, but wouldn't compose there unless he was sure no one could hear him - which was rare. Later, a dealer set him up with a piano which was kept in a combination lumber storage-chicken coop. In the coop/lumber yard he composed some of his most famous works.

2. Stravinsky was romantically linked to Coco Chanel - a relationship that's explored in the 2009 film Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. (Inspired title, right?)

3. Stravinsky was known for ruthlessly promoting his music in order to support his lavish lifestyle. One of his triumphs was the inclusion of Rite of Spring in Walt Disney's Fantasia. He also composed a commissioned work for dancing elephants which eventually become George Balanchine's Circus Polka. Stravinsky was able to negotiate a high commission from the circus for his composition.

Bonus actual Balanchine/Stravinsky elephant conversation transcript:

Balanchine: "I wonder if you'd like to do a little ballet with me."

Stravinsky: "For whom?"

Balanchine: "For some elephants."

Stravinsky: "How old?"

Balanchine: "Very young."

Stravinsky: "All right. If they are very young elephants, I will do it."

4. The audience protest at the 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring was so loud that neither the dancers nor the audience could properly hear the music.

5. Towards the end of his life, Stravinsky became especially fond of the game Scrabble. Bonus question: How many points is "Stravinsky" worth?

Get all the Stravinsky you can handle at OBT's The Stravinsky Project opening February 26th.

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Gavin Larsen in Fertile Ground Festival 2011

2011-01-07T10:31:00.000-08:00

Fertile Ground 2011 is a ten-day arts festival celebrating new work by Portland artists. This year’s festival will feature over 50 Portland-generated new works, along with a myriad of other arts events from Portland’s creative community. From fully-staged world premieres in theatre, to ensemble and collaborative driven work, dance, comedy, visual art and film, this festival spans the spectrum of creative endeavor and seeds the next generation of creation through artist conversations, workshops, lunchtime readings and more.

Oregon Ballet Theatre staff and dancers will be participating in world premiere works all over town on seven of the ten days of the festival. Below is a choreographer interview with OBT's own Gavin Larsen about her work for the Fertile Ground Festival, from Fertile Ground's Blog written by OBT's own Claire Willett

NAME: Gavin Larsen
PROJECT: A Ghost In the Room With Us

A Ghost In the Room With Us plays at 7 pm on Wednesday, January 26th and 6pm on Sunday, January 30th at Conduit (918 SW Yamhill, 4th Floor). Tickets are $15. More info here.

ABOUT GAVIN
Gavin Larsen has danced with Pacific Northwest Ballet, Alberta Ballet, the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, Ballet Victoria and most recently as a principal dancer with Oregon Ballet Theatre. She is thrilled to continue exploring the limitless language of dance by incorporating, considering, and learning from the distinct dialects of her fellow artists and collaborators, David Biespiel and Joshua Pearl. Gavin is currently on the faculty of the School of Oregon Ballet Theatre.

EIGHT ONE-WORD ANSWERS
1. A Choreographer I Admire Is . . . I admire anyone with the bravery to create dance!
2. My Choreographic Style Can Be Described As . . . “Gavin Larsen the Dancer” Meets “Gavin Larsen speaking without words”
3. A Portland Artist I Admire Is . . . Josie Moseley
4. I Am Terrified Of . . . Feeling trapped
5. I Am Obsessed With . . . Moving and expanding outside the boundaries of my own skin
6. The Book Currently On My Nightstand Is . . . Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon
7. Three Adjectives That Describe This Play Are . . . Thought-Provoking, Classic, Beautiful
8. In the Indie Art-House Biographical Film Of My Life, I Should Be Played By . . . [EDITOR’S NOTE: Gavin didn’t answer this question, but Claire feels strongly that she should be played by Embeth Davidtz. If you've seen Matilda and have met Gavin, you will agree with her.]

FIVE QUESTIONS OF DEPTH AND SUBSTANCE
1. Tell us about your Fertile Ground Festival project.
Three of us, poet David Biespiel, dancer Gavin Larsen, and musician Joshua Pearl — the trio that call themselves Incorporamento — are returning to the Fertile Ground Festival with a collaboration of original poetry, dance, and music, “A Ghost in the Room with Us.” Building on last year’s heralded Fertile Ground performance, we’re trying to allow audiences to interpret performance in a new way. We’re defining and fusing the lines between three classic forms of art. “A Ghost in the Room with Us” burns with recollection, introspection, and meditative reverie in a fabulous performance of renewal, insight, and pleasure.

2. How did this piece come about? What inspired it?
As soon as last year’s FG Festival shows ended, we were already talking about what we would do next. We knew we wanted to move to a more polished and fully produced show, much more in-depth, and include both original and existing work. We kept meeting to have “jam sessions” all spring and summer, and the pieces in this show are the results. We’re inspired by the concept of noticing that inner self that we all have, who travels with us through life, but is often as mysterious and effervescent as a ghost.

3. Talk about your creative process. (How do you work? When do you work? What gets you moving?)
We each work independently, and then bring something to the table, so to speak, at each rehearsal. Some of our pieces were born from the seed of a piece of music, some from one of David’s poems, and some from my movement. We blend them together without stepping all over each other’s work.

4. What is the most exciting/inspiring piece of live performance you’ve seen in Portland?
Honestly, it’s some of the OBT performances that I have either performed in or seen my colleagues do. I am routinely floored by the amount of talent and creativity in these studios.

5. What are you up to these days when you’re not creating?
I teach full-time at the School of OBT and coach the children that appear in any OBT production, so that has kept me very busy all fall and winter. When I’m not doing that, I’m refreshing my soul by moving my body and trying to live up to the high creative standards of Joshua and David. Doing this FG performance is like getting a drink of water after a long thirsty spell. I can’t stop gulping it down!

We are so proud to have so many OBT artists presenting work for the Fertile Ground Festival. Get your tickets or festival passes today!

Tell us what you think - What's the best part of seeing a world premiere performance?

Haiku Creations

2010-11-08T11:07:00.000-08:00

Welcome to November, everyone! I had the opportunity to see the splendor of Fall in Boulder, Colorado this last weekend. A small group of nine dancers performed at the Macky Auditorium on Saturday night with four pieces, Tolstoy’s Waltz, Tarantella, Known by Heart Duet, and Like a Samba. Dancing at an elevation of 5,400 feet was a little bit of a challenge, but we all survived and the audience loved it. It was a very quick trip, there on Friday and back on Sunday.

On the plane ride home last night, as we were reflecting on our short time in the sunny, mountain city, we thought some poetry writing would be a good way to pass the time. The following haiku poems were written by four people (Anne, Brian, Javier, and Julia), each person writing one line without knowing what anybody else wrote, passing the paper around until we had amassed a collection of vignettes. We were quite surprised at how some of them turned out, so we thought we would share them with you. Enjoy!

thin fresh mountain air

flying upwards, deftly now

oxygen I breathe

the sheep with the star

stalls the creative process

swoosh powder flying

no one is alone

how did we get here from there?

where will we go now?

restless pattering

hot guy at gate forty-one

the hobo is rich

And, in fact, our second round was so amusing, we decided to present it as one massive haiku:

Backwards turkey eyes

the heat of the sun in Fall

in the woods we go

Snacking on the plane

women strut while hunting prey

a handful of friends

In the grass worms sing

eternally ungrateful

homeward quickly please

Kisses and crackers

if it tastes good keep eating

the drink of the gods

Vanity ruins us

golden leaves on sunlit trees

the wishes never come

Mile-high dancers

succulent tastes abound there

strangers in the night

Act 4

2010-10-15T16:21:00.000-07:00

The (rarely staged) final act of Sleeping Beauty includes the reconciliation of the Lilac Fairy and Carabosse...

We've had three great performances so far, plus one equally great student matinee, and are in the final stretch of the last three shows. The dancers are more than just hanging in there through their fatigue, which must be considerable (several of the women dance five roles in EACH show, changing costumes for each part, while the lucky ones merely have four). Everyone is dancing incredibly well and the company looks stronger than I have ever seen it. That's the reward for tackling such a hard classical ballet. If you haven't seen it yet, surprise surprise, I recommend that you do!

Backstage at Sleeping Beauty 2010

2010-10-10T00:24:00.000-07:00

Finally, after so many weeks of rehearsing and months of planning, Sleeping Beauty opened tonight to a huge, enthusiastic audience who witnessed a near-miraculously smooth production. So many dancers, crew, musicians, sets, costumes, wigs, special effects, supers, children in this ballet-- it's amazing to me every time a production like this comes together. But it always does, beautifully and with grandeur, emotional resonance, and exhilaration.

Here is a quick peek at a couple of the people backstage who make the magic happen:
Diane, one of the women overseeing the many, many wigs and hairpieces in this production, checks her craftsmanship:

There is also a fair amount of special makeup for different characters in Sleeping Beauty. Sarah is our makeup artist, transforming people into their stage personas. Here's her workstation.

And here's Sarah with her tools:

Sleeping Beauty Studio Dress

2010-10-01T21:30:00.000-07:00

Don't worry, it's not loaded! Christian's just practicing his authentic "hunter stance" during an Act 2 studio dress rehearsal last week. There are so very many costumes-- and quick changes-- in this ballet that we needed to do a couple of run-throughs in costume at the studio to prevent being overwhelmed with huge skirts, props, capes, boots, etc., once we got on stage.

Here's Hannah displaying her lovely countess costume, also from the Act 2 Hunt scene. The hunt ladies' costumes are quite wide... I can already imagine how much extra square footage they will take up in the wings and hallways backstage.

Only a couple more studio rehearsals before we relocate operations to the theater next week and launch into a flurry of tech and dress rehearsals. The ballet is coming together beautifully, but what an incredible undertaking this is. There are so many elements beyond the dancing that will unite to make the production a true spectacle: costumes, set, props, children, music, special effects, acting. Amazingly, no animals.

Dance United 2010, continued

2010-09-19T21:15:00.000-07:00

Seven generous OBT supporters arrived at OBT today to collect their winning auction item from Dance United 2010: a semi-private ballet class at OBT on a quiet Sunday afternoon. It was such fun to lead a class of these devoted fans! I think we all had a great time, and an extra thank you to David Saffert for providing us with inspirational and fun music to make learning a develope seem less challenging!

... And hello again to Portland

2010-09-19T21:05:00.000-07:00

We're long since back to Portland after our summer adventures overseas. This blog has fallen silent due not to disinterest but extreme busy-ness. Sleeping Beauty opens in three weeks (slightly less than, actually) and there is still an enormous amount of work to be done. Choreography to be set, variations to be perfected, corps de ballet sections to be rehearsed, supers to be incorporated, pantomime to be learned, children's roles to be taught and rehearsed... I could go on and on.

The hallways of OBT are full of crates marked "BALLET WEST SLEEPING BEAUTY". We are renting Ballet West's costumes for our production, and they arrived last week. Costume fittings began in a hurry on Wednesday and will be ongoing until the moment we open the show. Space is so tight that racks of costumes are being parked in every available space in our building-- hallways, offices, the lobby. Sleeping Beauty is a big ballet, with a lot of characters, and a LOT of costumes! (And a lot of wigs, by the way.)

The dancers are working full-tilt for this production, as is every other person involved with OBT. The whole building has a sense of electricity to it, there's so much going on at any moment, and everyone's watching the clock and the calendar... But as as Leonard Bernstein said, "To achieve great things, two things are needed: A plan, and not quite enough time."

Agreed.

Goodbye to Seoul

2010-08-22T21:07:00.000-07:00

The last performance of our run here in Seoul was yesterday afternoon, so we are officially done with our engagment here and are about to head back home to Portland. What an incredible experience this has been. From the sights and sounds of a foreign city to the culture, food, currency and most importantly, the people we've met and worked with, this journey is one that none of us will forget quickly. I think this tour has been exciting and a huge success on many levels for many people, not only for us at OBT. Maybe we'll be back someday to continue to build upon this bridge that has been forged.

Goodbye for now, Seoul Arts Center!

Free Day and Back to Work

2010-08-18T19:24:00.001-07:00

Monday was our day off here in Seoul, so in preparation a group of us went out dancing on Sunday night after the show to a club called "Noise Basement 2," and that's basically what it was. It was a fun night, but I got in around 4 am, so I chose to rest on my free day by doing some shopping and not making too many plans.

I had dinner with some friends Monday night at place called "Blue Ketchup.

The first thing I noticed upon walking in was that it was very dark and there was dance music playing. Then, I noticed the big screen all around the room with images being projected on it. The images varied from geometric shapes to, my favorite, ocean waves.

It was back to work on Tuesday with a little bit of Nutcracker rehearsal and some Sleeping Beauty rehearsal for the ladies and Brett in preparation for our performance with the Oregon Symphony at the Waterfront later this month.

I decided to go to Myeong-Dong between rehearsal and the evening show. On the ride there I noticed this awesome fountain right near the Seoul Arts Centre where we are performing.

All the tickets for the Tuesday show (and tonight's show too, I think) were bought by 1 company for their employees, so the audience was great. Applause erupted half way through snow, something that hasn't happened in my memory of Nutcracker. After the show a group went out for what was supposed to be a 30 minute picture session with the crowd, but they were pulled out after 10 minutes because they were being surrounded and it seemed like the situation might not be entirely safe. Tonight we are doing and autograph signing after the show, so we'll see if that is a bit more successful.

The audiences have all been fantastic here, but something it has taken some getting used to is that instead of applauding here after the curtain comes in, they stop clapping until the curtain goes back out and the performers walk forward and actually take their bow. My first Drosselemeier here I went out on stage for my bow with the kids after Act 1 and felt like I was standing there with egg on my face because about 3 people were clapping when the curtain went back out until I walked forward with the kids and then the audience gave us a pretty enthusiastic round of applause.

I'm not dancing in the next 3 shows here (2 Drosselmeiers and a show off), and since I have no rehearsal today I'm going to skip class and go exploring/shopping with Gavin Larsen.

-Steven

Last Day Before Opening

2010-08-14T06:00:00.001-07:00

Well, today was our last day before opening night. It's been a little weird having such a limited amount of stage time. Yesterday evening was our first rehearsal on stage, tonight we had our dress rehearsal, and tomorrow afternoon we open!

Dress rehearsal went fairly smoothly, all things considered, and I feel pretty confident in the quality of show we'll give tomorrow. I think many of us are uncertain of how we'll be received because we are quite different from the russian trained dancers they are used to seeing.

I'm still very much in awe of the theater we are performing in. They stage is huge, and while the house is quite large, it still has a very intimate feeling to it. Also, I'm a sucker for any theater with a chandelier in it. Here are some shots from the back of the stage, back of the house, and of the chandelier.

Lastly, one of my favorite things about Nutcracker is being transformed into a character through make-up, and especially the time between when I get my make-up done and when I put my costume on (my make-up call is and hour before curtain for this run, and my costume is very hot, so I usually don't get dressed until 15 before curtain). I feel so funny wandering around backstage looking like an old man from the neck up, and my 24 year old self from the neck down. Here's Javier as Grandfather and me as Drosselmeier killing time before putting on our costumes.

On a non-dance related note, the cicadas here are going crazy. This is the loudest I've ever heard cicadas be. Also, after many years of visiting family back in Pittsburgh and Ohio and hearing the noise constantly, I finally got to see what one looked like. Brian and I were visited by one outside our room this morning so I snapped a shot. They are so weird looking. Anyone recognize those wings?

Alright, I think that's all I've got for today.

-Steven

Second Day of Rehearsals

2010-08-13T07:51:00.001-07:00

It's hard to believe it's only the second day of rehearsals, it feels a bit like I've been here for a couple weeks. We had our first rehearsal on stage tonight, which I hear is very disorienting (I haven't rehearsed on stage yet, so I can't speak from experience). It's very deep, but about as wide as it is at home.

Maia got her first taste of the being pulled on the winch (or as we call it "the wench"), but because it wasn't her cast rehearsing she ended up trying it in her street clothes with one pointe shoe on. I couldn't help but snap a picture.

Tomorrow holds an Act I rehearsal on stage with the kids and a full dress in the evening (and hopefully something more interesting to write about).

-Steven

Free Day and First Day of Rehearsals

2010-08-12T19:21:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy couple of days here. The weather is warm and humid (88% today), and there hasn't been much blue sky, but it's so amazing being here.

Wednesday was our Free Day. Some of us took the bus the has been chartered for us to class. It was a real kick to watch it drive up to our hotel with a huge nutcracker ad on it's side.
We had an optional class in one of the studios in the theater complex. The studio is much wider than we are used to, but not quite as deep. The floor is pretty slick, even with rosin, so we've been trying to dance as full out as we can without slipping.
After class a group of us took the subway first to the Universal Ballet's studios to try and contact an old friend of Brett's, and then to Insa-Dong. Trying to figure out how to buy subway tickets (even with the machine on the English language setting) was somewhat tricky.
Martina made from friends on the subway.
We found the studios, but Brett's friend wasn't there (I think they are on a break right now). However, another company member was there and called Brett's friend and they were eventually able to meet up. Oh the small world of ballet.
Yesterday (it's Friday here) we had our first day of rehearsals with the kids. They are sooooo great. They are incredibly smart and well trained, and just really delightful to work with. I've already made friends with the boy who is playing the Prince/Nephew, which I'm really happy about since I'm doing quite a few Drosselmeiers while I'm here. I'm really impressed with the Port de Bras (carriage of the arms) of the kids, especially the boys.

On the break I checked out the plaza outside of the entrance to the theater (we've been entering through the stage door) and it's really beautiful up there. There are restaurants, art exhibits, and even a little astro-turf area for playing.
Because we have 2 Sugar Plums out right now, we've hired Maia Mackateli (you may remember her from Dance United 2, she's from Dutch National Ballet) to dance with us. Here she is rehearsing with Chauncey and Christopher.
Finally, here are some shots of the AMAZINGLY huge theater. I still can't get over the size of the both the onstage and off stage areas.

-Steven

Safe and Sound

2010-08-10T18:49:00.000-07:00

Well, we've all arrived safe and sound in Seoul. The hotel is great and I'll post some pictures of that later today. It was an uneventful second flight, but I have a feeling I'll never really consider another flight to ever really be "eventful" again with that first one as my basis for comparison. At least the complimentary slippers helped a little bit.

I'll do my best to keep you all updated, but there's not telling how busy I'll be since we'll be starting Sleeping Beauty rehearsals while here.

Off to Class!

Steven

Surprise!

2010-08-09T20:28:00.001-07:00

Greetings from Alaska! It seems that when we tour with The Nutcracker we just can't stay away from Anchorage, AK.

Due to an unscheduled in-flight fight, we are currently making a brief stop to allow police to help a belligerent shirt-less man de-plane.

We are all safe, but pretty shaken up. We're sitting on the plane until they are able to refuel and get statements from those involved in the altercation. In the meantime we are getting a beverage service and a snack.

I guess when I said "let the adventure begin" I should have been prepared for anything...

-Steven

Stage 2: Check-in and Boarding

2010-08-09T14:18:00.000-07:00

Well, we have all successfully checked in and made it to the gate. They just announced that our flight is delayed, but haven't announced a new departure time yet. It's weird to think that in 11 hours from take-off we will be in another country and it will be tomorrow night. Hopefully the next time I have anything interesting to say I will be writing from Korea.

Let the adventure begin!

-Steven

Stage 1: The Bus

2010-08-09T11:52:00.000-07:00

So, the first leg of our trip involves a 3 hour bus ride up to the Seattle airport. On such a long bus ride the activities include, but are not limited to:

Stretching

Sleeping

Studying (in this case for pilates certification)

Keeping up with current events

And playing with a mobile phone

Stage 2: Checking In - Coming soon.

-Steven

The Day Before

2010-08-09T09:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday some of us went in to the studio to stretch and do some barre (because of our travel plans we would have been at least 4 days without a class or rehearsal). Well, stretching and doing some barre turned into a Grand Pas rehearsal (I think that leaving the lights off keeps it feeling like a rest day instead of a work day). Here's a picture of some of our Sugar Plums and their Cavaliers rehearsing in the dark:

More to come as we venture across the Pacific to bring The Nutcracker to Korea.
-Steven

OBT Goes to Seoul

2010-08-08T05:27:00.000-07:00

Big excitement, lots of preparations, and finally Kevin, Thyra and I arrived in Seoul yesterday to finish coaching the cast of Korean children for OBT's performances of Nutcracker here, set to open later this week. Entering the lobby of the Seoul Art Center, where we are to perform, we see posters for all the upcoming shows and looked eagerly for OBT's images and logo. But all we could find was.... Cinderella On Ice?? HUH? Has there been some mistake? Have we been booted in favor of an ICE BALLET?!?

But luckily, before panic set in, we saw the real advertisement outside--- a larger-than-life banner for OUR performances, hung on the side of the building for all of Seoul to see (and buy tickets for). Phew!

TADA!