When the Vero Beach Museum of Art invited Ballet Vero Beach to create dances inspired by its current exhibit of moving sculpture, few expected the exercise in cross-media exchange to be more than an enjoyable experiment.
Instead, those lucky enough to grab a seat in the sold-out 240-person Leonhardt Auditorium last week saw a stunner of a show. And the marketing message to both organizations? Cross-pollination of the arts can make an audience blossom.
Now, it’s the Majestic Theatre that is collaborating with Ballet Vero Beach. On Sunday, a talkback lecture by Ballet Vero Beach artistic director Adam Schnell and ballet master Camilo Rodriguez will precede the midday broadcast of Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet performing the extravagant “La Bayadère.”
And there will be similar lectures preceding each of the performances in the Bolshoi season to be broadcast this season.
Schnell approached the Majestic to allow the newly formed professional ballet company to be included in the Bolshoi broadcast events. An opera buff like his parents, Joan and Michael Schnell, Adam Schnell knew the theater already cross-promotes with Vero Beach Opera.
That group’s leaders, Joan and Roman Ortega-Cowan, encouraged the Majestic’s owner, Rick Starr, to broadcast the Met Live in HD performances from the Metropolitan Opera soon after the Majestic opened in 2008. The Saturday afternoon simulcasts, promoted by Vero Opera among its members and listed on its website, have been a huge success, often selling out and the Majestic now broadcasts on two screens to accommodate the crowd, as well as a re-broadcast on Tuesday evenings.
Notably, the National Theatre Live simulcasts from London’s acclaimed stages have been far less well attended; to date, there is no cross-promotion in place with Vero’s professional theater, Riverside Theatre or the all-volunteer Vero Beach Theatre Guild.
“The fact is you really can’t get this close to the action without spending a lot of money on the really great seats,” says Schnell of the broadcast’s production, which involves high-definition cameras on state-of-the-art booms, sweeping across and above the stage, with directors switching from the control room to focus on key movements or faces.
The showing of “La Bayadère” is particularly important historically, he says, as Russian ballet went dark for Western audiences during the Cold War.
“We were trying to piece these ballets together as dancers fled communist countries, and we are now able through technology to see them in our own country.”
The Bolshoi will be performing a new version of “La Bayadère,” originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and updated by the Bolshoi’s Yuri Grigorovich.
Set in India, the performance will feature an all-star cast including prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova.
“It’s probably the Bolshoi’s biggest and most over-the-top classical ballet,” he says. “It’s the classic 32 girls dressed in white all doing the same thing, and in most productions, there’s a giant fake elephant that the prince rides in on.”
While “La Bayadère” is a broadcast of a performance recorded earlier, others this season will be simulcast live, including “The Nutcracker” on Dec. 21. As Schnell will explain to the audience that Sunday, it was Grigorovich who first created a plot line in which toys and dolls in the first act become characters in the second act. “It’s a very interesting version,” he says.
Later in the season, the Bolshoi’s “Romeo and Juliet” is from the original Russian choreography. “You’d have to fly to St. Petersburg or Moscow to see it live,” he says.
Schnell and his cohort, Rodriguez, will have particular insight into the Russian ballet style, which differs from that seen most often in the U.S. They both danced professionally with Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, a transvestite send-up of Russian story ballets, complete with made-up Russian-sounding ballerina names.
As audience members remarked to Schnell after the museum’s presentation, he is a gifted public speaker who presents his considerable knowledge of ballet clearly and with passion.
Indeed the dance that followed was equally articulate. The museum-ballet collaboration produced a polished performance of impressive choreography, pulled off with Zen-like assuredness.
Each of the three pieces was introduced by a video explanation of the sculpture that inspired it. Set to music, the kinetic pieces moved miraculously in time, as if dancing as part of the company.
The production included only one professional dancer – Rodriguez, who danced in and choreographed two of the three works. Schnell choreographed the third piece, a solo, for Rodriguez.
The two other dancers were apprentices at the most recent Riverside Dance Festival. Zachary Tudor, 22, a film major at UCF who previously came to Vero from Sarasota to swim for IRSC’s renowned team; and Shannon Maloney, 21, an accounting major who studied dance under Schnell at Riverside and IRSC.
It is to Rodriguez’s credit that he gave these novice dancers movements they could execute so well. And it is to their credit that the pieces held together so perfectly, despite demanding mechanics and synchronization.
As in the videos, the music accompanying the dancers evoked the moving sculptures: Anne Lilly’s highly engineered linear forms prompted Schnell to use Vivaldi’s “Violin Concerto in E Minor” for his work of classical ballet choreography, danced with steely precision by Rodriguez.
Rodriguez the choreographer saw an Asian inflection in Lin Emery’s sculpture and used fluid Japanese music for the duet he danced with Maloney, using minimalist unisex costumes of tank tops and stretch samurai pants in gunmetal grey and black.
For the final dance, Rodriguez was inspired by the more approachable petal shapes and gliding curves of Pedro S. de Movellan’s sculptures to set his trio of dancers to Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence.” He and Maloney, who are close to the same height, wittily played off Tudor’s rod-like frame nearly twice as tall. They peered out from behind him, swapped places repetitively, and lay on their backs with legs up and feet twitching in unison. Once the two were scooped up on each of Tudor’s swimmer’s arms and propelled to the front of the stage as if on castors.
Brief as it was, this was the most sophisticated of the fledgling company’s performances – there have only been four to date, and the second season officially opens on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2015.
“I think it’s so great that just coming off the performance at the museum, we’re getting to a place in Vero where all the organizations are starting to say, ‘Hey, you’re doing this over here, and we’re doing this over here. Let’s get together and do it together,’“ Schnell suggests.
“I’m not ready to present to them a full-length ‘Swan Lake,’ but guess what? I can tell them to go see the Bolshoi. They can see Ballet Vero Beach, and they can see the Bolshoi here, too.”