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Report: State Ballet Coffee Hour

Three folks joined our Meetup at the State Ballet Coffee Hour at the Brae Crest School. State Ballet is gearing up for their production of Giselle, May 14 - 15. We'll be posting the video shortly, but below are some images from the event.

The school is in a lovely wooded setting in Lincoln and the studio is well-lit, as you will see from the images. Besides serving coffee and finger foods, the program is a compact series of demonstrations, showing how a student goes through various levels in a company school. (The company will hold another Coffee Hour series in April. For dates, and more on Giselle, check their web site: http://www.stateballet.com/sbri/news/.

Beginning students would be the "chicks" around the mother hen (Sara Hamel), a more experienced dancer.

The next stage a dancer arrives at is "soloist":

ABOVE: Adrienne Raheb, dancing the Blue Bird solo Variation. Raheb receives an SBRI scholarship as a company dancer.

(Left) Principal dancer Brooke DiFrancesco in her Giselle costume as the simple country girl, the heroine of Giselle.

Also on the Coffee Hour program was an inside view of State Ballet's upcoming production, Giselle. Ana Marsden Fox, daughter of the company's founder, Herci Marsden, narrated for us. Most informative (and amusing!) is the way she follows the dancers' every move, shouting out what each character is thinking or saying with their movements. You will see that in the video. But below we have posted some highlights:

Below we have the villain, Myrtha, queen of the ghostly creatures called wilis (note the eye makeup -- she's a very cold being).

The company also showed how they rehearse the lead roles when more than one set of dancers is doing the show. They rehearse in tandem, which makes it a very interesting study in the uniqueness of dancers. You get an even better feel for these differences in the upcoming Coffee Hour video. below, Elizabeth Rogers will also be dancing Giselle, and with her is Javid Moghaddasnia playing the gallant prince Albrecht.