Swan Lake Recap and Summer Plans

What a whirlwind week. Yesterday a cast of just a few dozen kids and teens performed a mature classical ballet with beauty and maturity. Even more than their dancing, I'm proud of their patience, diligence and send of humor during the rehearsal process. Both Swan Lake and the performances by my jazz, tap and pre-school students went smoothly. The kids had fun and the audience loved it  

This was my third year producing and directing a student performance so I felt pretty prepared by Tuesday's final studio rehearsal. Too prepared.  On Wednesday I realized we didn't have nearly enough backstage volunteers to handle the 20 - 30 performers under age 10 in the cast and sent a frantic email to almost everyone I know locally asking for help. On Thursday--the day of our first rehearsal in the auditorium--I found out that our videographer wouldn't be able to record the show after all and that the print shop I'd counted on for programs was closed for the week. Thankfully, a very dear friend and fellow dance school director stepped in to take care of both of those tasks and volunteered to take photos of the performance.

A whole other set of potential problems was waiting for me at the auditorium. The stage hadn't been cleared or cleaned since the school's play a few weeks before so I spent the hour before dancers arrived moving set pieces and props around. Shout out to the high school student who helped me move a heavy sap-covered log after I interrupted his piano practice with my cries for help! Despite that minor inconvenience, the backdrop still on stage from the play ended up being a nice addition to Swan Lake so it all worked out nicely.

Once we got the theater set-up the stage rehearsals were mostly easy sailing. I had a crew of fantastic backstage volunteers who helped the kids get lined up and in order so I could focus on other things and actually watch my dancers. Not every piece was technically perfect but no one left the stage in tears or stood frozen like a deer in the headlights!

Now that the dance season is over, I'm looking forward to a few months of focusing on other aspects of my life: swims and walks with my son, lots of time working in the garden, and taking as many dance classes as I can. One of my biggest priorities this summer will be to spend some time working on the book I'm editing about dancers and body image. I also plan to submit my first MFA program application by the end of July (more on that later).

Before I do any of that,  I should probably clean my house. A distracted mom and two year-old can make some big messes.

Swan Lake: Crunch Time

My students are less than a month away from performing excerpts from Swan Lake at our annual spring showcase. We began the rehearsal process for the corps de ballet sections way back in January (due to the limited amount of time I have with the dancers each week) and I was filled with a lot of doubts: Who was I to condense and re-stage such an important ballet for a cast of mostly recreational ballet students? How would I stay true to the story's original darker themes while being sensitive to the fact that the cast and audience would include young children?

Over the past several weeks I've discovered that I'm more capable than I thought. My students are also far smarter and more adept than I realized. Choreographing and staging any ballet--but especially a story ballet--requires the courage to be vulnerable. You're taking ideas and worlds and shapes you've formed inside your head and releasing them into the world. It's a lot like writing in that sense but with one significant difference: when you write stories you're not using real live people as your tools. As a choreographer your subjects are dancers, real people with thoughts and feelings and opinions In this way making dances is fundamentally collaborative--adjusting to the strengths and weaknesses of your subjects while striving to stay true to your original vision. Writing is more comfortable for me because I can work through my ideas in isolation. The backspace button never gets impatient when I have to rewrite a sentence over and over again the way a dancer might when I re-choreograph a phrase of music.

A few days ago I had the full Swan Lake cast together to work through the entire ballet for the first time. I dreaded the worst--total chaos in the corps and confusion during the pas de deux--but things actually went smoothly! It looked like a ballet--a ballet that needed lots of rehearsal time, but a real ballet that told a story. I'm always looking for things to polish and tweak in my choreography but during that rehearsal I made sure to take some time and just enjoy the fact that things were working. I wasn't as crazy and incompetent as I assumed!

I'm excited to see how everything shapes up in the next month as we put the finishing touches on choreography and costumes. I can't wait for my hard-working students to share this ballet with an audience!

Swan Lake Begins

In my last couple of post, I mentioned that I'm staging a mini-production of Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake with my students this spring.

Even abridged, that's a huge undertaking. We haven't even started rehearsing yet, but I'm already freaking out a little bit. What was I thinking?

I chose this ballet for a number of reasons. First, it's fairly easy to abridge. I'd love to do a full-length production of a classical work in the future, but for now, my resources are too limited to be able to do that well. I think we'll still be able to tell a cohesive story with our shorter length version with a little creativity. I also wanted the first ballet HMAC tackled to be something familiar to most audiences.

Casting such a major, iconic ballet with a small number of students is proving a challenge. Swan Lake traditionally has a very large corps de ballet. I'm working with a total cast of about twenty dancers (about half of whom are under the age of ten).  I have some blocking ideas for how to make the stage seem fuller and plan to use my little ones and jazz students as supers (extras) when needed. While I don't have many dancers advanced enough to tackle the Petipa and Ivanov's iconic choreography, I'm trying to model mine after the original as much as possible. I'm excited for the challenge this will give my more advanced students, particularly those playing the principal roles. I hope Swan Lake will push them to hone their acting and performance skills along with their technical prowess.

Thanks to the freezing cold weather in our neck of the woods, I have an extra two days out of the studio to edit music and work on choreography. In spite of my stress and nerves, I'm ecstatic to bring this gorgeous music to life on stage for local audiences!