STUDENT PERFORMANCE SERIES STUDY GUIDE: OBT 25: EVERYTHING LIVE! October 16, 2014 / Keller Auditorium Noon - 1:00 pm / Doors open at 11:30am Dear Educators, Photo by Joni Kabana celebration. Inside you will find information about the choreographer, composer and costume designer, focusing Welcome to the season opening show on collaboration. The Study Guide will also present of Oregon Ballet Theatre’s 2014-15 information that gives examples of how the art of dance Student Performance Series entitled can be explored through the lens of math linking to OBT 25: Everything Live! This SPS Oregon’s Common Core State Standards. performance for student groups is part of Oregon Ballet Theatre’s Kasandra Gruener, MA anniversary celebration of 25 years Director of Education Outreach as a dance company in Portland, Oregon. We are so happy to share this time with all of you! We will show the complete version of a brand new KEY TO USING THE STUDY GUIDE ballet—a world premiere—entitled, Never Stop Falling (In = Academic connections or discussion points Love). This Study Guide will look at the making of that ballet, one created especially for OBT’s 25th anniversary = hyperlink to more information We think this Student Performance Series show is a “1-2-3…Knockout!” for students in our community. Here is why: it is a world premiere of expansive choreography created by Nicolo Fonte, exquisitely executed by Oregon Ballet Theatre’s dancers… who are bedecked in innovative costuming from Project Runway’s Season 11 winner and Oregon native, Michelle Lesniak, all in collaboration with internationally acclaimed Pink Martini, led by band leader Thomas Lauderdale and vocalist China Forbes whose multi-lingual and multi-faceted music transports the audience atop rollicking rhythms, past percussive silence and deep in to sinewy, sensitive song… Put all this together with a bold set and stage lighting in Portland’5’s Keller Auditorium and everyone will be Thomas Lauderdale of Pink Martini. Photo by Joni Kabana. KASANDRA GRUENER, MA / DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION OUTREACH OBT’S EDUCATION OUTREACH PROGRAMMING IS SUPPORTED BY OBT is supported in part by grants from the Oregon Arts Regional Art & Culture Council, including support Work for Art, including Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts from the City of Portland, Multnomah County and contributions from more than 75 the Arts Education & Access Fund. companies and 2,000 employees. William H. & Mary L. Bauman Foundation Clark Foundation PGE Foundation Anne A. Berni Foundation Northwest Natural Wintz Family Foundation The Boeing Company OnPoint Community Credit Union Juan Young Trust Pacific Power Foundation 1 STUDENT PERFORMANCE SERIES / OCTOBER 16, 2014 / KELLER AUDITORIUM NEVER STOP FALLING (IN LOVE) CHOREOGRAPHER: NICOLO FONTE Choreography: NICOLO FONTE Nicolo Fonte is an American Assistant to the Choreographer: LISA KIPP choreographer, born and Musicians: THOMAS M. LAUDERDALE, piano; CHINA FORBES, trained in New York, who had vocals; GAVIN BONDY, trumpet; NICHOLAS CROSA, violin; most of his career as a dancer PHIL BAKER, upright bass; TIMOTHY NISHIMOTO, vocals and percussion; BRIAN DAVIS, congas and percussion; ANTHONY in Europe. He has since made JONES, drums and percussion acclaimed ballets for many Music: Let’s Never Stop Falling in Love, Ich dich liebe, Askin companies throughout Europe Bahardi, U Plavu Zoru, Hey Eugene, Hotel Amour, Chopin and the United States—he Berceuse, Op. 57 D-Flat Major, Joli Garçon has created two ballets for Composer: PINK MARTINI OBT! He is presently the Costume Design: MICHELLE LESNIAK Resident Choreographer at Costumes Constructed by: OBT COSTUME SHOP Ballet West. (Ballet West is Lighting Design: MICHAEL MAZZOLA the dance company featured World Premiere: October 11, 2014, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Keller in television’s Breaking Auditorium, Portland, Oregon Nicolo Fonte Pointe.) His choreographic WHAT IS A WORLD PREMIERE? ideas require dancers who are trained in classical ballet, but who can also leap outside the bounds of ballet’s movement At the end of the program notes it states that Never Stop vocabulary in every imaginable direction. Falling (In Love) is a world premiere. That means it is a work of dance art that is being presented for the very first time, often within weeks or even days of its completion. Sometimes a choreographer will make more changes and additions to the work right up to moments before the curtain goes up on opening night! This would be the same as editing a term paper right up until moments before you hand it in. A program, sometimes called a playbill, is handed out to the audience when they enter the theater to take their seats. It is an historical record of the dance concert and is the place to look to find the order of dances and who is dancing. It includes articles about the dance company, information about key personnel, historical notes, advertisements and a list of donors who contribute financial support to the company. Program notes for Never Stop Falling (In Love) are listed above. This takes the place of a program at the theater. When the ballet is performed again in the future, even by another dance company, all of the above information will be listed, including the fact that it had its world premiere at Oregon Activity for students after seeing the performance: Pretend Ballet Theatre. you are a Graphic Designer and it is your job to design the program cover for Never Stop Falling (In Love). You have one Here is a link to a template that helps students create their chance—the Student Performance Series—to see the ballet own programs for school plays or concerts. and then you are to design the cover from that one time of http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/lesson-plan/create-playbill observation. What will you include on the cover? What is important to tell people about the ballet? As the designer you Every winter for the last 25 years, OBT has been doing a might include the parts of the ballet that you remember the special ballet—The Nutcracker. most, the parts that you were surprised about, the way the stage looked with the musicians and dancers on it, the shapes While there have been different versions of choreography, of the light on the stage, and the costume colors. You could the story has remained basically the same. Even though it even try to express the dancers’ and musicians’ energy. Have has been the same story, each program cover has received fun designing your program cover! You may use the template a fresh new look. The Study Guide includes six examples of included in the Study Guide. (See page 9.) Please send OBT a Nutcracker program covers from 1989 to 2013. (See page 8.) copy of the cover and we might post it on our website! 2 KASANDRA GRUENER, MA, DIRECTOR OF EDUCATION OUTREACH / 503.227.0977 / [email protected] / www.obt.org/outreach_youth.html STUDENT PERFORMANCE SERIES / OCTOBER 16, 2014 / KELLER AUDITORIUM Nicolo Fonte wrote a brief note to be included in the program: Never Stop Falling (In Love) gradually became dancing, but rather a journey of intense emotion. Working what it is through a wonderfully collaborative to create this journey day after day with the dancers, and inspiring process. The initial idea of creating first in Pioneer Square and in this rainy last little while a ballet to Pink Martini, a band I’d heard of at the OBT studios, has been one of the most joy-filled but never actually heard, was stimulating but also processes I have ever had. My heartfelt thanks to all the daunting. However, as soon as I began to listen to entire company and indeed to all the staff as well: there the songs I heard the unapologetic euphoria in the have been a lot of people working on this ballet right from arrangements and the gorgeous vocals of the group; the start. My thanks as well to the designers who have I found myself imagining a kind of Hotel of Love, a turned my vision of a Hotel of Love into an actual place place where delirium, hope, disillusion, and of course and time, Michelle Lesniak and Michael Mazzola, their romance, are all intertwined. Thomas Lauderdale has vivid imaginations and their creative sparks have really been an incredibly generous collaborator—he threw helped to ignite the flame of this work. Ultimately,Never open his entire canon of work, as it truly was his wish Stop Falling (In Love) is a celebration created in honor that I find my voice through it. And when I did, we both of Oregon Ballet Theatre’s 25th Anniversary, discovered a shared desire to create an experience and I am honored to be able to say “Happy unlike any other—not a ballet to Pink Martini’s Anniversary” with this work. greatest hits, not a Pink Martini concert with some Left to Right: Choreographer Nicolo Fonte, Martina Chavez and Brett Bauer, Nicolo Fonte with Colby Parsons in rehearsal at OBT Exposed (August 2014, Director Park) for the world premiere of Never Stop Falling (In Love). Photos by Blaine Truitt Covert. Nicolo Fonte met the dancers and began rehearsals for his new work at Pioneer Courthouse Square at the end of August during OBT’s annual weeklong event, OBT Exposed. OBT Exposed is a time for thousands of people in our community to freely get up close to the process of art in the making as OBT dancers take their daily class and rehearse in the open air on a portable stage. While the sun was beautiful, it was at times scorching hot and some days were in the high 90’s. Some of the dancers reported that their shoes melted on the hot floor and some who forgot to wear socks with their ballet slippers got blisters from the very hot floor.