Skyline Drive-in to show Ballet Northwest on the big screen

These days, drive-in theaters aren’t just for Hollywood movies and making out.

On Thursday, you can pile into your car — maybe wearing a tutu? — and drive to Shelton’s Skyline Drive-In for Ballet Northwest’s first dance concert on film.

“The performing-arts world has been dormant for a while now,” said Ken Johnson, who runs the dance company with his wife, Josie Johnson. “We’re really excited about this.”

“Ballet Northwest at the Drive-In” includes dances filmed at February’s Olympia Dance Festival and at a series of small outdoor recitals the company’s school held in June at the Thurston County Fairgrounds as well as 18 new solos choreographed just for the film by company dancers and alumni.

The 90-minute program, with tickets offered by donation, will include new work by such notable alumni as Ashley Baker, who dances with Ballet Idaho; Sunny Swasey, a dance major at the University of Utah; Karyn Tobin, a graduate of Seattle’s Cornish College of the Arts; and Emily Walter, a dance major at Point Park University in Pittsburgh.

“It’s an action-packed film with lots of different dance styles — ballet, contemporary, hip hop, modern dance, musical theater,” Ken Johnson told The Olympian. “We left it open, and it was really fun to see the diverse styles that the dancers are drawing upon for their solos.”

The film also offers dance fans the opportunity to see — or see again — dances set to Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” Ravel’s “Bolero” and Brahms’s “Hungarian Dance No. 5.” The Brahms piece featured live accompaniment by musicians with Student Orchestras of Greater Olympia.

Those classical pieces debuted at the festival, the company’s last public performance before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and were to be reprised at “Crescendo,” a collaboration with the Olympia Symphony that was originally scheduled for May.

“We kept pushing it back and pushing it back in the hopes that we’d be able to have it,” Johnson said. “But things haven’t gotten better, so we opted to do a film. We wanted to give our dancers some closure and a time to celebrate their achievements before the new season gets started.”

During the pandemic, the company’s Johansen Olympia Dance Center has offered classes online, and very small in-person classes resumed in June.

In late June, when Thurston County entered Phase 3 of the Safe Start reopening plan and before Gov. Jay Inslee tightened restrictions on live entertainment, the center held a series of small and physically distanced recitals at the fairgrounds. Three advanced dances from that recital are included in the film, along with a couple of videos documenting the history of Ballet Northwest, which celebrated its 50th anniversary with a gala in late January.

“We were going to show them at the show in May,” Johnson said. “We’re excited to share them with a larger audience.”

‘Ballet Northwest at the Drive-In’

• What: Ballet, modern and more dance genres come to the drive-in theater with a one-night-only film featuring Ballet Northwest dancers and alumni.
• When: 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 20
• Where: Skyline Drive-In Theater, 182 SE Brewer Road, Shelton
• Tickets: By donation at Eventbrite, with reservations required
• More information: 360-943-8011, http://www.balletnorthwest.org

This story was originally published August 18, 2020 at 5:45 AM.