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I'd guess that it was about 40 minutes long. It and an audience sing-along of Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming comprised the post-intermission part of the performance. The first half of the concert consisted of rose-themed songs, most of which compared either Jesus or Mary to a rose.

I had a rare chance to attend a performance (actually, 2 performances) of Hugo Distler's otherworldly setting of the nativity story from Luke's gospel, The Christmas Story, by Denver's sole professional a cappella chorus. Distler patterned the work after Bach's St. Matthew's Passion, with soloists singing the part of a narrator and key characters from the story. This puts a significant demand on the depth in the chorus, as there are solo parts for 2 sopranos (an angel and Elizabeth [mother of John the Baptist]), 1 alto (Mary), 1 tenor (the narrator), and 2 basses (Herod and Simeon). The chorus sings the parts of angels, shepherds, and scribes. As did Bach in St. Matthew's Passion, Distler embedded a common hymn in the work, in this case Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming. Unlike Bach, Distler wasn't content to let the chorus simply repeat the hymn a bunch of times, instead presenting a different arrangement for each occurrence of the hymn. I hadn't been aware of this wonderful work due to the scarcity of performances. It was one of the many of Distler's works that were banned by the NAZI's as "decadent".

This might have been the last thread that I start for Ballet Nouveau Colorado, because in March they are renaming both the performance company and their school, to Wonderbound and Colorado Conservatory of Dance, respectively. The HQ will move from Broomfield (in the far northwest corner of the Denver metro area) to just east of downtown Denver while the school will remain at its present location.

Kids in Paraguay perform with musical instruments made from garbage! For facebook users: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151279562307432&set=vb.759907431&type=2&theater For vimeo members: There doesn't appear to be a youtube video.

Dancing Outside the Bun is a blog written by Colorado Ballet dancer Sean Omandam, who played Puss 'n Boots in the video and was the primary Puss 'n Boots in the Colorado Ballet's production of Sleeping Beauty.

Sleeping Beauty also has gone Gangnam Style:

How 'bout a compromise? Since not everyone is a fan of Tchiakovsky, why not add Prokofiev instead? Would anyone dispute that his score for Romeo and Juliet is a work of genius?

There will be another benefit performance on January 19. This one will include additional dance companies who weren't able to participate in the November 11 performance.

Last weekend (Nov. 9-11) was the second and final weekend of Ballet Nouveau Colorado's production of A Dangerous Laison. The "Laison" comes from the collaboration between BNC and the Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado, which provided live music for the production. The program consisted of 2 dances, each in the 40-45 minute range. The first (unfortunately, I seem to have lost my program) was choreographed by longtime dancer BNC Sarah Tallman (who quite clearly is neither tall nor a man). and set to snippets of about 10 works by Vivaldi. It was apparently about a man who settled down on his sofa to do some serious couch potatoing, while other characters engaged in all sorts of shenanigans around him, much of which he was obvious to. It didn't come off as terribly original, and there was a little too much running around the stage and jumping on and off the sofa and too little real dancing for my taste. The second piece was choreographed by BNC artistic director Garrett Ammon and set to music by some Baroque composer that I had never heard of (if I ever find my program...). This piece was set circa 1950 and centered around 5 wimpy guys who were obsessed with their hats and the 5 women who loved to tease them. After a slow start, it degenerated into some actual classical ballet, which has become rare for BNC. At first view, on Friday, I thought that it was one of the most boring programs that I had ever seen. The stories, especially in the first piece, were not terribly original, and after watching the Colorado Ballet's Sleeping Beauty and Pertrouchka it was difficult to get excited about the relatively simple choreography. My opinion was rather obviously not shared by the rest of the audience, who responded enthusiastically to it. I decided that it must have been a bad day for me, so I went back on Sunday to give BNC a second chance. At that performance, I upgraded my evaluation to a solid "OK". As is usual for me, there was a lot that I missed the first time around. One thing that annoyed me even on the second trip is that the BCOC stopped in the middle of each piece to spend several minutes tuning. Both choreographers put in a humorous little section to fill in the tuning break, but it still disrupted the continuity of the dances. I asked a friend who is a violinist in a major early music ensemble about this and she said that while baroque instruments do go out of tune faster than modern instruments because of the gut strings, it was hard to imagine an orchestra not being able to adjust. After Sunday's performance, I went up to Boulder to attend a benefit show for an aspiring young dancer who has danced with some several minor companies in Colorado, most recently the Boulder Ballet, who was struck by a car while walking home from a class at the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Academy in Denver. Unfortunately, I surmised that her professional dance career is likely over, as she has not fully regained consciousness after more than 3 weeks. The program, which contained brief performances by dancers from 8 or 9 local companies, was interesting. There were several modern dance pieces that seem to have been taken from karate or kung fu forms and a beautiful performance of Sandra Brown's One By One by Chandra Kuykendall and Dmitri Trubchanov from the CB. The Zikr Sacred Dance Ensemble's performance of an exercise from G. I. Gurdjieff seemed to perplex the Boulder audience, which surprised me as I thought that Boulderites would really get into the unconventional spirituality. Anyway, they raised over $6,000.

A few years ago, the Colorado Symphony added a series of programs in which they concentrate on a single musical work. These programs contain a 45 minute to 1 hour lecture and demonstration on the history and interesting musical components of the work, followed after the intermission by a performance of the piece. Tonight, the subject was Stravinsky's Pertrouchka. The lecture was full of interesting tidbits, such as that one of Diaghilev's motivations for the project was to keep Stravinsky and Alexandre Benois from collaborating on a ballet independent of Ballet Russes. The highlight of the performance: 3 current and 1 former dancer from the Colorado Ballet danced the roles of the 4 principal characters. There is little crossover between the audiences for the Colorado Symphony and the Colorado Ballet, so I think that many in the audience were delightfully surprised that there actually are high quality dancers in Denver.

The shows on the other 2 weekends have sold much better, with the orchestra/parterre nearly full (except in the mega-bucks section) and the mezzanine more than half full. I barely managed to squeeze a couple of seats from the back row of the parterre for the last performance (no, I'm not that fat. I actually have a date). Audience etiquette hit a new low in the final Saturday matinee performance, at least in the mezzanine. During the whole hour that the Prologue and First Act take, there wasn't a single 60-second period in which I didn't hear someone talking. There was some kid crumpling up papers for the first 15 minutes and there was a kid (maybe the same one) apparently playing with beads on a necklace (or something - that's the only explanation that I could come up with). This surprised, because up until then I was thinking that it was amazing how well the small children were behaving. It ended up with the ushers letting me sit in an empty seat in the orchestra (interesting perspective, but too far forward for my taste). I wonder how much those costumes cost! I was thinking that it differed from last time. I thought that this choreography is a little less dramatic, maybe more of a children's story. And not helped by a couple of absences on the male side. There is one male principal who not only isn't in this production but wasn't in the season-ending production last spring. I don't know what the story is. One of the better men in the corps suffered a severely sprained knee in August and wasn't able to get it healed and rehabbed in time to dance in this production. It's taken me a while to really get into the production. I guess with the limited story and dramatic content, it's really a dancer's production, so dance illiterates like me have to watch it several times to learn enough to really enjoy it.

However, the CB often sells "rush" tickets at half price.

The Colorado Ballet has instituted a large ticket discount program for the remaining 9 performances of The Sleeping Beauty. People buying tickets online will be able to pay the next lower price for their tickets, e.g., they can buy a ticket in the $77 section for $50. One can't help but wonder if the motivation for this was slow sales.

Wow, it's been almost 3 months and I'm finally getting around to posting on this year's performance by Denver's Zikr Dance Ensemble, an organization devoted to re-creating the sacred dance styles of various spiritual groups. This year's program was a bit on the short side, as they were sharing the evening with the year-end performance of the dance school at the host location, the Parker Arts, Culture, and Events Center (Parker is a town on the south-east fringe of the Denver metro area), probably to get a discount on the theater rental. It nominally lasted about an hour and 20 minutes, but there were close to a half hour of breaks due to the need for extensive set changes. There were 4 works in the program. The first, longest, and most bizarre was titled Anasazi Dream. As the title indicates, it was artistic director David Taylor's interpretation of the Anasazi culture. It contains elements that could have been interpreted as fertility rituals and sacrificial rituals, but otherwise I don't know how to describe it (other than "different"). This work actually is a quarter century old, and was originally choreographed for David Taylor's own company (now known as the Dawson/Wallace Dance Project). There was original music written for it, which is also a little bit different. The 3 shorter works included 2 premieres of works choreographed by David Taylor and a sampling of dances from the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff. Both of the new works featured aerials, with the Cathedral of Light, a depiction of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres in France (curiously set to Rick Wakeman's Jane Seymour), having a levitating chief priest and The Oracle of Delphi having an airborne Pythia (I don't see how the dancer didn't get motion sickness). Part of David Taylor's agenda seems to be to give younger dancers a showcase, and The Oracle of Delphi was centered around the Colorado Ballet's Caitlin Valentine-Ellis and Christopher Ellis as The Supplicants (just as last year, all the dancers in the performance were current or former members of the Colorado Ballet or the Dawson-Wallace Dance Project or both). I can't wait for next year's show!

I'm not sure whether this post belongs here or under "Other American Ballet Companies". I put it here because I would consider this show to be Modern Dance rather than Ballet (moderators: feel free to move it). I was underwhelmed by the Aspen-Santa Fe Ballet's performance 2 years ago, but I went to the second of their 2 performances this weekend at the University of Denver anyway. I wasn't quite as underwhelmed, but I wouldn't have minded having not spent the money or time. There were 3 pieces, all in the 20-25 minute range and all were abstract works. None of the 3 seemed to have any overarching theme to it, the first piece, Square None (choreographed by 23 year-old Norbert de la Cruz III) in particular seeming to consist of a series of ideas with little connection. They all, at least in parts, seemed to be portraying people working out. They all seemed to have lots in them that served no purpose other than to fill up time. They all to varying degrees bored me, with the middle piece, Stamping Ground (choreographed by Jiri Kylian) being annoying to sit through, the first 15 minutes seeming to serve no purpose but to add length since no one would pay for a 10-minute dance work. The dancers in the Aspen-Santa Fe Ballet are incredibly athletic, as well as attractive, and one thing that stands out about their performances is that I've never seen anyone look the least bit off kilter. I think that it's tragic that the they can't seem to find any choreographers who are capable of creating works that are of the same quality as the dancers. The previous night, I attended an exhibition by the Colorado Ballet at which they performed a work that they premiered in Spring, Embellish (by Jody Gates), and I was struck by how much more unified that work was than were any of the pieces performed by the Aspen-Santa Fe Ballet, even though Embellish is also an abstract rather than story ballet.

The season opener is tonight, and I now see 29 dancers listed. Three are new names, so two additional dancers must have left (but I haven't identified them yet). Adam Still was rewarded for his strong performances last year, including playing Peter Pan in the 'A' lineup, with a promotion to soloist.

I think that it might encourage dancers to concentrate more on eye-catching athletic stunts rather than on artistic interpretation (I've never found Olympic figure skating to be impressive in any artistic sense). I also imagine that there would quite a lot of disputes about the judging, as judges from different styles would likely tend to favor dancers from their style. I personally don't care who the best dancer in the world is, just as I don't care who the best musician in the world is. I only care whether I experience something from watching them perform. Good enough is good enough.

The CB web site currently lists 2 fewer dancers than were in last year's company. I believe that the company has re-grouped (the first performance is less than 4 weeks away), so either they are slow in adding the replacement dancers to the web site or they are going to go with fewer dancers this year. According to the web site, auditions for this season were held back in January and February. The 2 dancers who left are the only changes to the roster that have been shown; the 28 dancers currently listed are all back from last year..

Today (June 25), the CSO announced that they have signed former Dallas Symphony music director Andrew Litton to the role of "artistic advisor". This role apparently means that Litton will fulfill most of the duties of a music director, such as approving all the programming, but will only conduct a limited number of programs (probably 3 in the 2012-13 season). IMHO, this is good news as now there will be an internationally-known conductor affiliated with the CSO.

For this weekend's end-of-the-season program, the CSO is offering seats at whatever price someone is willing to pay for them, with a minimum offer of only $1!

An article in today's The Denver Post hinted that part of the motivation for dumping the debutante ball was that people whose daughters didn't get selected to be debutantes became disinterested in donating money to the CSO.

The attendance at the CSO has been very impressive this Spring, especially considering the limited number of low-priced seats (thank goodness for my student ID, which has been getting me substantial discounts to concerts ). They virtually sold out all 3 performances of their (hard to believe) first ever programming of Shotakovich's 11th symphony last weekend (given Denver's large Russian immigrant community, some of the credit goes to having a Russian soloist - in this case, pianist Olga Kern - in the program as well). IMHO, an overdue move. Though I'm hardly an unbiased commentator. The irony would be delicious.

In the latest twist, the Colorado Symphony has ended its 56-year relationship with the Denver Debutante Ball. The DDB has raised an average of $75000 a year for the CSO and in return the DDB got a seat on the Board of Trustees. The DDB's representative was one of the 20 board members who resigned because the union musicians allegedly were unwilling to take pay cuts to keep the CSO above water (the musicians actually did agree to pay cuts). One wonders if this was retaliation by the CSO for the resignation. It certainly will take a lot of the luster from the DDB (does anyone really care about debutante balls any more?) unless they can find another prestigious charity to give them a reason to exist (Colorado Ballet?). In the unlikely event anyone is actually interested in the details: http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/blog/broadway_17th/2012/05/colorado-symphony-severs-ties-with.html

The best part: a live orchestra for the Repertory Series!!! At the "Fancy Footwork" exhibition, Gil Boggs said that he in fact has danced in Tetley's The Rite of Spring (presumably when ABT performed it at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in January, 1993).

This apparently will be the first time the CB has ever performed The Rite of Spring. (At least it's not included in the list of works they've performed on their website.)