Joseph Anderson during the Weeping Solo in Orpheus. Photo by Zebra Visual
This weekend I went to see Project Orpheus, performed by Seattle Dance Project. Seattle Dance Project was co-founded in 2007 by Julie Tobiason and Timothy Lynch. Julie and Tim both retired from PNB as Principal Dancers and are now teachers at PNB. After retiring, Julie decided to explore dance around Seattle, where she performed with different dance groups for a couple years. In 2007 Tim and Julie decided to put together their own group, Seattle Dance Project, where they could hire high-caliber dancers who had past professional experience and who felt passionate about performing again.
This weekend was the premiere of the company’s second production, called Project Orpheus. They chose to create a modern version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. What was unique about this version is that Julie and Tim asked three well known choreographers in Seattle — Wade Madsen, Eva Stone and Olivier Wevers — to create the piece. Eva focused on the furies and underworld scenes. Wade choreographed the party, snakebite and request for Eurydice scenes, while Olivier took the dramatic part of the story where Orpheus is devastated by the death of his beloved Eurydice. It was amazing that these three unique choreographers were able to create a full-length story so well developed and connected. Each dance smoothly transferred to the next scene, and the variety of movement made the evening balanced, well rounded and interesting to watch.
Project Orpheus started this weekend and will play until Oct 4th at the ACT Theater in Seattle. The dates are Sept. 19, 20, 26, 27 and Oct. 3 and 4, all shows at 8pm. I encourage everyone to come see this creative performance, and maybe I will see some of you there. I definitely want to see this again!
Also check out the Seattle Dance Project web site at www.seattledanceproject.org to find out more about the dancers and their mission as a company.
Hope everyone in Seattle can experience Seattle Dance Project.
And last, take a look at the making of Orpheus on YouTube.
What a great way to come back to the stage. After six months of recovery my first performance back couldn’t have been better. I dance The Orchard, music by Philip Glass and choreography by Damian Woetzel. The piece was choreographer on Tyler Angle and me and it premiered last year at the Vail Dance Festival. A couple of months ago I received a phone call from Damian asking me to dance his piece again at the opening Gala for the Vail Dance Festival. He also added that Philip Glass and Wendy Sutter would be playing for the performance. I can’t even describe how I felt. All I can remember was thinking: I hope I am back dancing at that time!
And I was. That was my first show back. Dancing along with Philip Glass felt surreal. Both, he and Wendy Sutter, are amazing people to be around. Their energy and the sound they create together makes you forget where you are. Also, it is always a pleasure to share the stage with so many other talented dancers from different companies. Among them were the Paul Taylor Company, Wendy Whelan, Craig Hall and Fang-Yi Sheu.
My other shows, one with PNB and two for the International Evening of Dance, were also great. It was such a pleasure being onstage again without major lower back pain. I was very careful in class and rehearsals, and by the time I had to perform I even forgot I was just coming back from an injury. It felt so natural and exciting to me.
Colorado is a wonderful place and the Festival Damian Woetzel created was a huge successes. I fell lucky to be able to come back to the stage this way.
I will keep you posted about our exciting new season coming up in September with 2 World Premiers by Twyla Tharp.
Company class on stage at the Amphitheater
Peter Boal teaching class. This theater is really magical.
PNB rehearsing Concerto Barroco with the Fancy Free set on the back. Principals Miranda Weese and Carrie Imler leading the show.
Philip Glass rehearsing for the opening Gala of the Vail Dance Festival. This photo was taken by Principal Dancer Louise Nadeau. She took beautiful photos of our rehearsals in Vail. She’s got the touch…
For more photos of the shows, rehearsal and for videos please check back at www.vaildance.org and at http://www.flickr.com/photos/vaildance/
New stuff is updated everyday until the end of the festival!
Enjoy it!
I would like to share with all of you this great sports clothing company, MPG, Mondetta Performance Gear from the Canadian clothing company, Mondetta!! Here at the Pacific Northwest Ballet we are lucky to have direct contact with MPG’s clothes and development because one of our soloists, Chalnessa Eames, is married to one of the principals and the CEO of MPG. Chalnessa has shared with us dancers her husband’s passion in creating fashionable and at the same time comfortable clothing for all types of people with an active lifestyle, and of course for us dancers.
MPG’s clothes are great for ballet or doing errands around the city. All the pants are flexible and fit nicely on the body and the best part of all they always look great. Their shirts and jackets are perfect because they keep you warm in class and in rehearsal but they are breathable so you never feel too hot or the opposite, wet and cold. As well as using many of the dancers as models, MPG has created a SOUL card program, which gives a discount to athletes and professionals that embody the dedication, drive, and passion that the creators at MPG respect. If you are a dancer or a professional athlete check your mail boxes to see if you have received your SOUL card. If you didn’t get one, contact Tony Lavilla, Brand director of MPG, and he will get you one. His e-mail is: tony@mondetta.com . You guys can also check their clothes at their website: http://www.mpgsport.com/
But wait, I still have more to tell you about MPG. To add to their incredible clothes, MPG is also reaching out to help the world. This feels very important to me and I want to make sure people are aware about their efforts. The more people that reach out for others the better our world can become. Here is some information, from Tony Lavilla, about how MPG is helping many families in Africa.
GIVES BACK PROGRAM
MONDETTA CHARITY FOUNDATION
At MPG, we believe going forward includes giving back.
From our beginning, we have dedicated 1% of gross sales to the
Mondetta Charity Foundation (MCF), a completely separate entity from
the Mondetta Clothing Company. The MCF was established to provide
assistance to ease some of the suffering in Africa due to devastating
problems such as AIDS and the ravages of poverty.
Four principals of the Mondetta Clothing Company were born in Uganda
and Kenya and have deep-seated emotional ties and a strong allegiance to the African Continent. While the problem of AIDS remains enormous,
MCF aims to tackle the hardships of life in these regions by taking
action where it counts, and push toward the vision of a better,
healthier future for those nations.
Tony Lavilla, Brand Director
Bravo to them!! Here is what our dancers are saying about MPG:
“I can stretch, keep warm and show clean lines. MPG has brought fashion into
performance.” Chalnessa Eames
“MPG is so multi-use, so fashionable you wouldn’t expect it to be
comfortable too.” Rachel Foster
“Knowing the background of the company, I love that MPG is created by
people who are passionate about creating high quality clothes and
giving back to their community at the same time.” Kaori Nakamura
“Up until now, you couldn’t move in beautiful clothes. That’s no
longer true with MPG. I feel comfortable, totally at ease, and I look
amazing. MPG is going where no one else has gone.” Olivier Wevers
Hope you guys enjoy MPG as much as we at PNB (dancers, ballets masters, employees, all our significant others) are enjoying it!!!
Chalnessa Eames
Casey Herd
Kaori Nakamura
Peter Boal teaching class. Sorry about the blurry picture, I didn’t want to disturb class too much and one try to get the picture is all could do!!!
Ben Griffiths posing to show off his MPG shirt before class. Jordan and Seth are also at the barre wearing MPG.
Picked up at my apartment this morning at 7 am by Nev, camera in hand and tape rolling. Bleary eyed, I staggered into one of the two car services waiting. One had been called by mistake, by Ginger my assistant, and in an effort to be super organized we have truly pissed off a very grumpy Indian driver. We zip uptown on the early Sunday morning traffic-less streets of Manhattan’s Upper West Side to pick up Elizabeth our administrator, who is likewise bleary eyed and soapy smelling from the shower she has taken minutes before we pile back in the van and set off for La Guardia airport to take our flight to Vail. Today is Elizabeth’s 25th birthday, so July 29th is a shared birthday between Lib and Morphoses the Wheeldon Company.
Nev is shooting footage so we have film to make webisodes for our site and also to document the first steps of Morphoses. He clips a radio mike onto my belt as we wait for some of the dancers to gather by the United check-in desk. One by one, the dancers arrive, are they all really here for my company? Wendy Whelan, Craig Hall, Gonzalo Garcia who recently arrived in New York to take a position as principal dancer at City Ballet in the fall but dancing with us this summer. Following is Teresa Reichlen and Adrian Danchig-Waring. Immaculately organized and dressed in her own inimitable style. (She makes fabulous imaginative jewelry.) Victoria Epstein, our tour manager, instructs the dancers on the check-in procedure. All cruise through security except for me who is of course hauled aside for a scrutinizing extra check. I think it must have been my threatening English pinstriped trousers.
We sit in departures as a group happily chatting comparing technologies (mainly iphones and Blackberries). Lourdes and family arrive. Calista, her youngest daughter, chats excitedly with Wendy and I about a fish she had caught in the Hamptons. Adriel greets the group with a sleepy yet fresh and beautiful charm. George, Lourdes’s husband is dapper in a pressed shirt and grey slacks . His fatherly concern and devotion to Morphoses always touches me. He believes in us and it really translates into genuine caring support. A wonderful personal touch, he is surprising the dancers when we arrive in Vail with personalized backpacks and Morphoses sweatshirts. We continue to sip coffee and I eat my bran muffin suggesting that all the dancers take one. A suggested slogan :
“ Morphoses, we keep our dancers regular! “
Katy arrives with baby Jack . His blue eyes and white blonde hair enchant everyone. Katy will have her hands full in Vail between Jack and her ballet mistress-ing duties. Her family is in Colorado Springs so hopefully she will have her parents to help.
Looking around I am suddenly overcome with pride. This is my group of dancers. These people represent the beginning of a new part of my career, my life. They have come together to create dance, to emanate beauty, such important food for humanity. Can we really do this, change the way ballet is viewed by the dance world and the public? I believe that we have to try. Over the next ten days with a group from all over the world we will create new work, rehearse existing ballets and perform twice. Focusing on process and performance and developing a technique of presentation that allows the audience into our world just enough to feel welcome and involved and to fall in love with the people who are fascinating and often underestimated, the dancers.
Okay so I skipped a few days. Actually it’s August 29th today so I skipped quite a few days, and what amazing days they were.
We arrived in Vail to a warm reception from the festival. I think all of us were thrilled with our mountainside accommodations. We shared condos in a complex in Beaver Creek (unfortunate name but stunning location). The reps from the festival met us at the condos and filled us in on the various transportation and activities during our stay. It all felt a bit Dirty Dancing mixed with summer dance camp although I don’t think anyone was underestimating the amount of work that was ahead of us. That night I zipped over to Vail to watch the opening of the Festival. First act only, as Lourdes Lopez our Executive director and her husband George had arranged a welcome dinner for all the dancers to meet. So there we were, sun setting over mountain tops on a balcony-overlooking town. A group of dancers from several acclaimed international companies. A fantastic feeling of goodwill and excitement and a healthy dose of travel exhaustion. By dessert we were all close to passing out so the night swallowed us in.
The first few minutes into morning class I would pinch myself. Here we were finally, a small company with a real performance to deliver. An absolutely stellar group of dancers, a wonderful executive director and spectacular place to perform. We assembled each day at The Ford Amphitheater, an outdoor stage with a roof covering the seated audience and stage but with no walls, revealing the spectacular surrounding mountains. By the Stage Door a stream rushed by and the backdrop of the stage was a garden of wild flowers. Sounds idyllic and it was, especially taking morning class in the open air.
Olga Kostritsky taught us every day, pulling together our different schoolings into one unanimously popular class. The mood was light and jokey although the mix of styles created a very interesting sense of friendly competition. The dancers from Hamburg displaying a distinctly classical training in class and a controlled abandon in performance. The City Ballet dancers characteristically American, theirs a full and daring movement quality with the distinct Balanchinian style. Laeticia Giuliani unquestionably Italian, her movement sensual and generous. It was wonderful to be working alongside Carla Korbes and Miranda Weese again, two dancers who left City Ballet to explore careers at Pacific Northwest Ballet . We all went along to cheer for them in their performances with PNB later on in the week. I was honored and proud to have such a group working for me and they reciprocated with hard work, many hours in the car driving to the rehearsal venues, and two absolutely spectacular performances.
Rehearsals over the ten days were divided between four venues some as far as 35 minutes away from each other. My particular favorite was the auditorium of The Valley Mountain School in Vail. It proved a quiet and removed space that allowed for focus in the creative process. It was also fun to create on the stage of The Ford Amphitheater. Nothing quite like mountains in the summer sun to provide inspiration for a new ballet. Both Edwaard Liang (an ex-City Ballet dancer, dancing and choreographing for me this year ) and I made some new work in Vail . Ed’s new pas de deux ‘Vicissitudes’ premiered at the end of our stay and we previewed a ten-minute excerpt from my new work, which will have its premiere in London next month at Sadlers Wells. I think we were both turned on by the majesty and beauty of the surroundings. One day during class it was difficult not to be distracted by the hummingbirds dancing around the flower garden at the back of the stage. Such is the inspired beauty of nature. It was at times easy to forget the struggles of the world whilst we were hiding out in Vail .
The first week was tough as we all found the travel between rehearsal spaces to be logistically challenging. Often the dancers had to spend their lunch break sitting in traffic on the highway between towns. Luckily tired as we all were, everyone seemed happy and we celebrated the end of our first week with a cookout in my condo . Of course it was meant to be by the pool but we were rained off so we gathered on Sunday evening and had an eat fest largely supplied by Lourdes and George.That was the day that confirmed my suspicions that I had gathered not only a supremely gifted group of artists, but also a fantastic bunch of people.
George and Lourdes
Aside from the dancers, Lourdes brought her family. Her husband George who was our biggest supporter and took it upon himself to be a very successful activities director. Their daughters Calista, ten going on thirty, and Adriel who is off to Yale this semester .They were a super family and included everyone in a feeling of love and support. Yaniv Schulman came along and made two insightful and moving short films that were shown at “ Up Close with Morphoses”, the first and most intimate of our two performances. These proved a hit with the audience as I knew they would . It really gave them a look into our personalities, our process, and above all our accessibility as people and as a company. It will always be the goal of Morphoses to be welcoming to the public and to shed some of the mysteries of our art form . That’s not to say that a certain amount of mysteriousness isn’t alluring, but I think that many people fear ballet because of a long enforced inaccessibility. Films and personal insight invites a wary and suspecting fence sitter into our world.
My assistant Ginger Tidwell came as well, and was soon nicknamed mother Ginger. She was awesome and made sure that everyone was well taken care of as well as seeing that I made it to my many rehearsals on time. I cant remember a happier professional time in my career.
Our administrator Lib was with us and she made sure that all was running smoothly behind the scenes. And then of course Victoria Epstein, the most spectacular company manager of all time, and likewise Loreen Domijani who spent sleepless nights lighting the stage and running the performances with a biting wit that kept us on our toes and laughing even in the pressured moments. Katey Tracey was also a force to be reckoned with. Her perfect schedule calculations, and as always, totally thorough rehearsing of my work was invaluable. Katey is totally unflappable even with baby in one arm and a rehearsal schedule in the other. I was truly a blessed artistic director and couldn’t have wished for a better team.
Cameron at the piano
I know for those of you that were with us you might be thinking “but you forgot Cameron and Helena”. Ahh but I didn’t, I was just saving the best till last. Cameron Grant made our group complete with his exceptional playing of the piano in both ‘Polyphonia’ and ‘After The Rain’. He and his wife Helena had a close brush with nature when a baby bear broke its way into their condo, stole a yoghurt (low fat) from the fridge, only to be seen peering out the window yoghurt in hand, to make sure no one was watching. The rest of the week we would find signs posted all over the complex warning of the hungry bears.
Of course it would be unrealistic of me to think that I could always provide this kind of blissful environment for my dancers, and I look on these two weeks as our innocent time, probably the only innocent time of Morphoses, before we are looked upon and are judged for better or worse by public and critics alike. I do however feel confident in my philosophy that happy confident dancers give magnificent and radiant performances. From the beginning of the inaugural performance on the last night of our stay I knew that the dancers felt like they were part of a company. I also know that they felt the intense pride, support and appreciation from myself, Lourdes and all the others who had brought us to that point and we were not afraid to show it. I was moved by the way the dancers swept the audience along with them and especially by how the audience surrendered to them. It gave me such hope in our beautiful art form and in its future. For those of you that doubt we can do it, just watch us try. You may be right, but you certainly will have a hard time stopping us from giving it our best shot.
Vail International Dance Festival program
MORPHOSES/ THE WHEELDON COMPANY.
Gerald R Ford Amphitheater Vail Colorado Friday August 10th 2007.
POLYPHONIA.
Choreography by Chrstopher Wheeldon
Music by Gyorgy Ligeti
The beautiful Carla Korbes (our fellow Winger) and Casey Herd (her fellow PNB-mate) are in Southern California this weekend, guesting the lead roles in Swan Lake.
Sadly, I wasn’t able to watch the performance, but I managed to sneak backstage during the final few strains of Act IV.
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