Ballet Quad Cities' "Ballet on the Lawn" at the Davenport Outing Club -- August 28.
Sunday, August 28, 1, 3, & 6 p.m.
The Outing Club, 2109 North Brady Street, Davenport IA
For the third year in a row, the professional dancers of Ballet Quad Cities bring their considerable talents outdoors in the company's latest incarnation of Ballet on the Lawn – a trio of August 28 performances at Davenport's Outing Club that will deliver, as artistic director Courtney Lyon states, “mostly all-new pieces. Which is surprising to me, because at first I thought, 'Oh, we'll kind of ease into the season … !' But somehow, we decided to instead do new pieces, or pieces that haven't been on stage for a long time, so they're all new to the dancers.”
In addition to the legendary Pas de Trois from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake danced by company members Isabelle Millet, Kira Roberts, and Christian Knopp, this year's Ballet on the Lawn will feature, as Lyon says, "a piece of music by John Adams called Short Ride in a Fast Machine. It's really minimalist, but it's very, very driving and very vibrant – it's awesome. We use the full stage with nine dancers, and Maddie McLaughlin is our lead. If anyone's seen her dance, she is a dynamo. She was brand-new to our season last year, and she really had developed into this major force on stage."
"Then there are a couple pieces that [Ballet Quad Cities Artistic Associate] Emily Kate Long and I working on that are going to be part of our full-length performance of Our Will to Live on October 8, which is part of the Quad-City wide 'Out of Darkness' Holocaust-remembrance event. [For information on the area-wide collaborative effort, visit OutOfDarknessQC.com.] That's going to be a full evening of works by Jewish composers who lost their lives in the Holocaust. So we're doing two short pieces from that to kind of get our feet wet in the topic, and to introduce our August 28 audiences to the idea that there'll be more works by Jewish composers in October, and hopefully they'll want to come back and see the full evening.
"One piece is called Infinity," Lyon continues, "and it's based off a piece of art that a local student did." A sixth-grader from Orion Middle School, Eve Wilbur created an artwork titled Infinite Tears, which won third place in the Meyer and Frances Shnurman Holocaust Visual Arts Contest hosted by the Moline Public Library. "I saw that piece and really liked it, and I shared it with Emily Kate, and we read the artist statement, ... . And so Emily Kate has created a piece of choreography based on that sixth grader's artwork."
"She's awfully excited," says Lyon of Wilbur's reaction to being the inspiration for a Ballet on the Lawn vignette. "We contacted her, of course, and talked to her mom – they're all excited. And it's being paired with the music of a composer [Gideon Klein] who lost their life in the Holocaust. And then I've done a similar thing, but I've used a piece of art [Kaddish] that will be exhibited at the Figge Art Museum" in Erwin Eisch & Mauricio Lasansky: Artists Remember, on display September 10 through January 15.
"We also have two guest choreographers," says Lyon on additional Ballet on the Lawn vignettes. "One of them is Claire Cordano, who has been a member of our company for four seasons, and she's doing her first piece of choreography. I don't have a title for it yet, but she's setting a solo on Mahalia Zellmer by composer Goran Bregovic. It's more of a theatrical piece about a woman who chooses to, instead of getting married like everyone expects, chooses to live her life by the beat of her own drum. It's really great.
"And then we have guest choreographer Deepali Phanse Bhagwat , who is the founder of the D4Dance Academy. She's choreographing an Indian folk dance to set on the ballet dancers and she's working with our company for the first time. It is so cool, because our dancers get to learn classical Indian folk dance and its style, and Deepali seems to be really enjoying working with our dancers, because she keeps saying, like, 'Oh my gosh, they learn so fast!' And I think it's really important for us, too. Joedy Cook does a fabulous job of incorporating all styles of dance, all genres of dance, all cultures – exposing the students here to every style of dance. And this piece is super-high-energy, they have the full costumes with the colorful sashes and full skirts … . I mean, it's beautiful.”
Rounding out the Ballet on the Lawn repertoire, says Lyon, is "our longest piece in the second half of the performance – a piece I did at the French Modern exhibit paired with the Figge back in 2018. It hasn't been on stage since then, and it's called Le Boeuf sur le Toit, which is like a nightclub in France. It's a crazy piece of music by Darius Milhaud that premiered in 1920, and it's kind of like a surrealist ballet – one that's really fun. It's a full-stage piece where you really get a sense of the dancers' personalities, and it's very humorous, and the music is inspired by Brazilian rhythms ... . It's amazing music.
“So we have quite a variety,” says Lyon of the full Ballet on the Lawn repertoire. “An hour full of all kinds of styles that showcases our 14 dancers' talents.” Still, with this year's choreographed showcase being presented three times within six hours, one might think the dancers would be utterly exhausted by performance three. Lyon would like to dispel that false notion.
"The energy actually escalates," she says. "Their first show is fabulous and the audience loves it, but the dancers just get better and better because they're feeding off the audience's energy show after show. So typically, by the third show, they're like, 'Oh, if the audience before liked that part and laughed, I'm going to see how many more laughs I can get this time!' It's so interesting to watch, because they're just feeding off that live-performance energy, and the audience is seated kind of in a semi-circle around the stage, and it's daylight, so the dancers can just look right at the audience, the audience looks right back. They really make that live-performance connection, and people just love it."
Ballet on the Lawn will be presented at Davenport's Outing Club at 1, 3, and 6 p.m. on August 28, and and charcuterie picnic boxes are available to order, with no outside food or beverages allowed. There will be a cash bar accepting cash only (no cards), admission is $15-25, and more information and reservations are available by calling (309)786-3779 and visiting BalletQuadCities.com.
