When Adam Schnell founded Ballet Vero Beach two and a half years ago, it was clear the new company did not have an official home. While Schnell works as Riverside Children’s Theatre’s director of dance, the ballet was its own entity with a separate board of directors. Its dancers were mostly based in Omaha, Nebraska, members of a then four-year-old company to which Schnell had a number of ties.
Then, support for the new, much-needed organization began to develop all around it, as if a net had dropped around the dancers and was hoisting them toward success. That first summer in 2013, Riverside Theatre partnered with the ballet to use its main stage for a benefit performance. That arrangement, in which a portion of ticket sales went back to the theater, has continued ever since for the company’s August performances. They typically feature outside contemporary dance companies whose members teach a summer dance intensive at Riverside.
“They open their home to us for two weeks,” says Schnell, who says talks are underway for future collaborative efforts with the theater. “It’s really been rewarding to partner there.”
In November 2014, the Vero Beach Museum of Art proposed an even deeper collaboration. In the museum’s 240-seat Leonhardt Auditorium, Schnell and his artistic director Camilo Rodriguez presented their choreography inspired by an exhibit of kinetic sculptures then on display at the museum.
The result was a riveting performance that left many in the sold-out audience speechless. The three new works felicitously combined, to Schnell’s surprise, to create a 40-minute long ballet, “Museum Pieces,” which is part of the company’s program this weekend at the Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center.
Last fall, the collaboration with the museum was reprised with new exhibits as inspiration. This time, the dances were set against projected images of the art works which splashed across the dancers as they moved through the projected light.
In February, a third collaboration with the museum takes place, this time in the galleries and throughout the museum as the ballet joins in a celebration of the museum’s 30th anniversary.
Schnell’s goal is to draw attention to the museum’s many roles; he plans “pop-up” performances on a staggered schedule, with choreography that functions on a sort of loop, without set starting and end points. Guests will be free to come and go during a given performance, and Schnell envisions using sound and other devices to encourage patrons to move from one performance to the next.
Now, Ballet Vero Beach is dreaming of more collaborations. It has sent out a request for proposals to orchestras, chamber groups, composers and musicians to provide live music at its performances.
“It’s been one of my artistic goals for the company to have the music live,” he says. “We’re getting to the point where we can fiscally add, in as many places as possible, live music.”
Schnell has reached out to the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, the Brevard Symphony Orchestra and Vero Beach High School’s highly regarded student orchestra. “We’ve gotten a lot of applications,” he says. “At least one came in from a composer.”
Schnell says the idea came to him after one of the dancer/choreographers in the February museum performance asked a composer friend to write an original score for her piece.
“In the request for proposals, I listed the music we used in our April concert last year. It went from Beethoven to Pink Martini to Catrin Finch,” says Schnell. “Just in case people might think, ‘Well, we don’t play ‘Swan Lake.’ We don’t always dance to ‘Swan Lake.’ ”
Pink Martini is a pop-classical-jazz fusion group from Washington State.
Finch is a Welsh composer whose Celtic-influenced music had never been used as a ballet score until Schnell heard it on the radio and decided to use it for his new work “Finch Concerto.”
That ballet will be staged again in April’s Ballet Vero Beach performance.
As for the August performance in collaboration with Riverside, Schnell has posted an invitation to other dance companies to apply. Dancers will serve as faculty at Riverside’s Summer Dance Intensive which culminates in a student/faculty performance. The company’s dancers then perform on their own through Ballet Vero Beach.
The response has stunned Schnell.
“We’ve got 16 companies in our first year – from as far away as India,” he says. “I literally spent two weeks this summer poring over videos, going, I don’t know what I’m going to do, they’re all so good. We’re getting them from up and down the East Coast. What a boon for Vero to be able to see this in our backyard.”
Schnell is hoping his company will soon be able to work with Vero Beach Opera, just as Ballet Nebraska does with Opera Omaha, providing dancers whenever operas call for them, as many do. In fact, last week’s “Die Fledermas” staged by Vero Beach Opera, needed trained dancers for the grand ball scene. In the end, two professional ballroom dance teachers stepped in because flying in dancers from Omaha would have been too costly for one performance.
As it stands, the joint use of dancers by Ballet Vero Beach and Ballet Nebraska is attracting an increasingly talented roster, says Schnell, since the two companies together provide the dancers with an income closer to a living wage, a relative rarity in the field.
“We have more talent than we have any right to for a company this size,” says Schnell. “We have between 22 and 28 dancers to choose from. It’s gotten to the point where we just want to have four casts for each dance just so we can show them all off to Vero.”
Meanwhile, the ballet continues its outreach, expanding not only awareness but fund-raising as well. Performances at the clubs of Windsor and John’s Island have generated great responses, he says, partly by virtue of the intimate spaces in which they’re staged.
He describes the moment after he introduced Camilo Rodriguez, Ballet Vero Beach’s ballet master and one of the company’s most impressive dancers. Rodriguez had a career with Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo and often performs en travestie with Ballet Vero Beach. But no one was expecting his hilariously imperious entrance at John’s Island Club, just feet away from guests, emerging on pointe amidst a cloud of feathers shedding from his white tutu.
“They loved it,” says Schnell, who noted soon afterwards an uptick in donations.
“It can’t just be me and Ballet Vero Beach. It doesn’t work that way anymore. There is no such thing as an arts organization that can go it all on their own.”
Ballet Vero Beach performs the world premiere of Schnell’s “Pastoral Symphony” as well as “Museum Pieces,” choreographed by Schnell and Rodriguez, Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. at the Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center. Tickets are available on the Ballet Vero Beach website.
“Museum in Motion” takes place Feb. 10 at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. Timed entries are at 5 p.m., 5:15 p.m., 7:30 p.m. and 7:45 p.m. There is no seating. Tickets are available on the museum website under the listing “Programs: Adults: Ballet Vero Beach Partnership.”
