By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Snow White may have found her Prince Charming in books and movies, including a brand new film, but she’s never been the star of her own ballet.
Eric Otto, the artistic director of the Toledo Ballet, has set out to remedy that gap by choreographing the story for the Toledo Ballet’s spring production.
“Snow White” will make her ballet debut this weekend with performances Friday, April 25, at 7 p.m. and Saturday, April 26, at 2 p.m. on the stage of the Valentine Theatre, 410 Adams St, Toledo. Click for tickets. There will be a Young People’s school performance Friday moring at 10:30 a.m.
The ballet’s own Liesl Kraft, 16, will play the title role with Liza Van Heerden, a ballerina from Cape Town, South Africa who now teaches with the company, as the evil queen.
While Tchaikovsky has set “Sleeping Beauty, “Swan Lake and “The Nutcracker” to music, and Prokofiev put “Cinderella” on her toes, no composer has put Snow White center stage.
To create the score, Otto assembled a score from disparate pieces by Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and Jules Massenet.
He listened through the classical literature for pieces he could imagine the Snow White’s story unfolding through the movements of his young cast.
“I really was drawn to it because I could hear and see the story of Snow White within these music sections, and that’s key — really listening to music and being able to tell story through pantomime, through dance, through acting.
The score will be performed by the Toledo Symphony conducted by Alain Trudel.
“I wanted to keep the story as traditional as possible,” Otto said, “ highlighting it through what we do well.” That’s classical ballet education.
He wants the performance “to show the community, to show the parents, the families, the supporters, all of the hard work that we’ve been doing at the ballet.”
The cast includes more than 80 dancers from the Toledo Ballet.
Otto also drew on his connections to brings in professional dancers to add a bit more luster to the production. Guest artists include Johan Mancebo, from the Cleveland Ballet, as the Prince, and Ruslan Sprague, from the Albany Berkshire Ballet as the Huntsman.
This has been a year of change for the ballet as it moved from rented facilities in Sylvania to the new TAPA’s Toledo Center for Live Arts, next to the Stranahan Theater on Heatherdowns in Toledo.
The facilities there, Otto said, are rival those of the professional companies in Chicago and New York.
Come next December when the ballet stages its “Nutcracker” next door at the Stranahan, it will be very convenient to have the studios so close to the venue.
Still Otto is pleased to stage “Snow White” in the more intimate Valentine. “It’s a charming, old historic theater, with a lot of history. and it’s downtown,” he said.”It’s just a really beautiful theater to perform ballet productions.”
This season has been the first with three larger-scale productions. Last October the ballet presented the premiere of Otto’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” He choreographed it to an original score.
Then in December, the ballet continued its tradition as the oldest continuous production of “Nutcracker.”
“Snow White” is the spring production.
Otto said that the plan is to make “Sleepy Hollow” a fixture in the fall and continue “Nutcracker.” And in spring he has programmed the comic ballet “Coppélia.”
He plans to develop a rotating series of spring ballets. He’d like, for example, to do a “Peter Pan” ballet, and maybe reach out beyond fairy tales.
The new space will also give the ballet the chance to stage smaller recitals, possibly in collaboration with symphony musicians.
