Ballet requires years of training. Learning to cheer for ballet takes a split-second. When Ballet Vero Beach founder and artistic director Adam Schnell gave a few hundred 9- and 10-year-olds a lesson on how to use the word “bravo,” they caught on in an instant.
The piercing shriek that rose from the packed orchestra seats of the Vero Beach High School Performing Arts Center Friday morning was ear-splitting. And that wasn’t all.
When the performance ended, and the children had seen just how six professional dancers earn their living (“This is their job,” Schnell told the kids. “They get paid to do this.”), gears started to turn in lots of little heads.
As Schnell stood before the kids in a post-performance question-and-answer session, hands shot up and stayed up all through the audience. The first boy he called on asked how many dancers were in the company. Twenty-three, Schnell told him.
That prompted a follow-up question. “Can I be your 24th?” the boy asked.
For Schnell, it was a moment that would move him to tears, repeating the story later for an adult audience that saw not only the dance but two more besides. “I don’t know if I can keep my composure as I tell you this,” he says, thanking Quail Valley Charities for footing the bill for the large-scale field trip and free admission. Schnell told his audiences that the charity has already signed on to sponsor another kids’ performance next year.
As for the adults, they saw not one but three remarkable pieces – all world premieres – in a program Schell called “Composers and Choreographers.” The first was a duo choreographed by Schnell to Vero composer and conductor Paul Gay’s ephemeral, faintly Asian composition “In Which Cio-Cio San Goes with Pinkerton.” It featured Vivi DiMarco, an exquisite dancer from Chicago who trained at the Hubbard Street’s Lou Conte Studio and was a trainee at the Joffrey Ballet; and Matthew Carter, who is ballet master for Ballet Nebraska, the home base for Ballet Vero Beach’s dancers.
The second somewhat more contemporary work, “Ophelia,” was stunningly choreographed by Chloé Watson, herself a Ballet Nebraska/Ballet Vero Beach dancer, who collaborated with composer Sean McVerry, a classmate at their respective conservatories at SUNY Purchase. McVerry, who plays at a New York piano bar as well as in an indie-pop band, performed his music on a keyboard set in a back corner of the stage, while dancers Katherine Eppink and Sasha York, equally emotive and equally excellent, danced as Ophelia and Hamlet.
The last piece was the one the children saw. Schnell’s “Anything You Can Do,” set to Vivaldi’s Concerto for Three Violins, had three men and three women dressed identically in white slippers and socks, black tights and white T-shirts. Divided by gender to dance identical dances, each dancer in the trios followed one melody line of the three violins. Classically inspired, the movements included hints of abstraction that with its gender-neutral roles lent the work contemporary appeal.
As he explained it Friday morning to the children, Schnell chose the work for them to see because it represented everyone’s equal ability to do what they most want to do. Clearly that’s a lesson he learned long ago. A sustained, screeching “Bravo!” to Schnell and company for one of Ballet Vero Beach’s finest concerts yet.
