Pointe shoes headed to the park

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This article was published 26/07/2023 (1162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet will bring scenes from the city that never sleeps — and the City of Light — to Assiniboine Park for this year’s edition of Ballet in the Park.

Headlining the free, family-friendly performances — which will be held at the Lyric Theatre tonight through Friday at 7:30 p.m. — will be the RWB company artists, who will perform Bleecker & 6th, a neoclassical work choreographed by soloist Stephan Azulay.

Set to Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and inspired by Azulay’s formative years dancing in New York City, the piece made its debut at Fast Forward, the company’s mixed-repertoire black-box theatre showcase, in March.

Soloist Jaimi Deleau has relished performing in a work choreographed by a fellow dancer.

“That’s a dynamic we don’t always get to have in the studio,” she says. “It’s very collaborative.”

Engaging the dancers in the process is what Azulay had in mind.

“This whole piece’s journey has been for the dancers,” Azulay says. “I wanted to give them something that they could really sink their teeth into technically, obviously, but have some fun with, too.”

Taking Bleecker & 6th outdoors will be a different experience from Fast Forward, he says. “The biggest difference for Ballet in the Park is the fact that it’s outside, and that’s something you can’t rehearse for. Outdoor shows are tough. We’re programmed as dancers to perform in a concert hall or a theatre, so when we go outside, there’s something so surreal about it.”

Ever-changing Winnipeg weather obviously poses a challenge at Ballet in the Park, but so, too, does the fact that the dancers are not looking out into darkness as they would in a theatre.

“When you look out and you actually see everyone, and you can actually hear everyone, it’s a little bit more of a visual distraction to work around,” Deleau says.

In addition to being a showcase for the company, Ballet in the Park provides an important prime-time performance opportunity for dancers in the RWB School’s professional and recreational divisions.

“It’s part of their training,” says Vanessa Léonard, director of the professional division’s Anna McCowan-Johnson Aspirant Program and former RWB company dancer. “You can train in the studio all you want and work on the technique, but it is very different once you get in front of an audience.

“And especially Ballet in the Park, which can be an audience of up to 5,000 people, which is amazing. It’s really important that they can take all that training and transfer it, with all the nerves, in a different atmosphere, and still maintain what they’ve learned.”

Senior-level students from the RWB professional division will perform three pieces. First up is the Diana and Acteon grand pas de deux from Jules Perrot’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame-inspired La Esmeralda, “which is extremely virtuoso and technical and exciting,” Léonard says.

That will be followed by the expressive, student-choreographed solo called Adios — “it has a great storyline and I think it really read well,” Léonard says — and the playful pas de trois from the Josef Bayer’s The Fairy Doll.

“It’s also quite technical, but funny and light,” Léonard says.

Recreational division vice-principal Katrin Benedictson says the challenge with Ballet in the Park is having the students send their energy much further afield than they’re used to.

“We tell them to project their energy to Sargent Sundae from where they are onstage,” she says.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com