Dancers of Houston Ballet II perform “A Dance in the Garden of Mirth,” choreographed by Stanton Welch, Wednesday in the Amphitheater. Houston Ballet’s first company will take the stage at 7:15 p.m. Saturday in the Amp for a performance with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra.
The Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra will pair with lauded ballet company Houston Ballet for an evening performance of interdisciplinary creation, innovation and artistry.
At 7:15 p.m. Saturday in the Amphitheater — an earlier start time given a forecast of cooler evening temperatures — Houston Ballet and the CSO, under the baton of Principal Symphonic Conductor Rossen Milanov, will perform a program of Balanchine’s “Stars and Stripes,” the Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, Sylvia Act I pas de deux, Madame Butterfly Act I pas de deux, an excerpt of “Maninyas” and the Don Quixote Act III grand pas de deux.
For those who are interested in learning more about the evening’s performance, Chautauqua Dance Circle will host a preview at 6 p.m. Saturday in Smith Wilkes Hall with Houston Ballet Artistic Director Julie Kent.
For Kent, Saturday’s performance is an exciting one, as is returning once more to Chautauqua. She came to the Institution as a student in the School of Dance early in her career, and has had a “very long and loving relationship with Chautauqua since I was a young teenager,” she said.
She’s happy to be sharing the repertoire with Saturday’s audience, and said the program features “a very diverse range of repertoire that highlights the artistic and technical and virtuosic talents of our company.”
The performances of Balanchine’s “Stars and Stripes” and the Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux are particularly special, because the dances feature two of Patricia McBride’s — director of ballet studies, principal repetiteur, and Balanchine muse — iconic roles.
“To have our dancers have the opportunity to be seen by her and to get some of her pearls of wisdom is always an honor and a thrill for them,” Kent said.
She also highlighted the pieces from Madame Butterfly and Sylvia, and “Maninyas,” choreographed by her creative partner and Co-Artistic Director Stanton Welch, Member of the Order of Australia (AM).
Madame Butterfly tells a love story of a beautiful geisha and a handsome lieutenant; keeping in theme, the Sylvia pas de deux portrays a love between shepherd boy Aminta and huntress nymph Sylvia. The vulnerability of an all-encompassing love is also starkly present in Welch’s “Maninyas.” Quoted several outlets, Welch has described “Maninyas” as a “process of unveiling,” that examines how “in relationships, you gradually un-layer yourself, and how scary, dark and open it is to reveal yourself to another, without protection.”
The program closes with a performance of the third act — including the famous pas de deux — of Ben Stevenson’s Don Quixote.
Kent described the repertoire as a “real amuse-bouche,” because the range is interesting, but the pieces are short in length — so viewers experience a “taste of all kinds of dance and music.”
The fleeting, in-the-moment nature of collaborative live performances such as Saturday’s requires a high level of mental energy from both the orchestra and the dancers in order to ensure that everything is coordinated perfectly.
Houston Ballet and the CSO will have had just one rehearsal together before the evening’s performance; the music must be perfectly on tempo as the dancers are used to a pre-recorded track.
Violinist Sharon Roffman, guest concertmaster for Weeks Five through Nine, will solo in “Maninyas.” She has played once with a ballet before and knows how dancers require a specific tempo; however, the solo in “Maninyas” has many double stops — two notes simultaneously — and is dictated accelerando, gradually speeding up. Roffman’s curious about the balance between freedom in terms of timing, and meeting the needs of dance’s physicality.
“The relationship between dance and music is sacred,” Kent said. “To have a live orchestra with 75 musicians and all of their energies and love and their life’s work brought to fruition — combined with all the same attributes of the dancers — is really magical.”
Kent encourages the audience to “trust their instincts” as they experience Saturday’s program, especially as the “Chautauqua audience is so inquisitive and engaged.”
“On a human level, it’s easy to appreciate and admire and understand these things — the career of a dancer and the success of an organization like Houston Ballet don’t happen without the collective leadership of a community,” Kent said. “People coming to the performance, supporting the organization, supporting the dancers, and being an essential part of that community makes performing arts possible.”
