Olympia ballet companies prep for spring performances

Just as the winter holiday season brings productions of “Nutcracker,” so spring has its ballets. This year’s crop consists of a couple — both comic, both classic and both beginning with C.

Studio West Dance Theatre’s “Cinderella” is happening this weekend, and next week brings Ballet Northwest’s “Coppelia.”

Orchestral collaboration

“Coppelia,” which Ballet Northwest last presented in 2011, will be the company’s first full-length ballet with live music. The production’s 80 dancers will be accompanied by 22 members of the Olympia Symphony Orchestra.

“Even a lot of professional companies don’t have the luxury of using a live orchestra,” said Ken Johnson, who directs Ballet Northwest with his wife, Josie Johnson. “We’re really lucky, and it’s a great opportunity for our audience.”

“It was a lot of fun last time,” said Huw Edwards, the symphony’s director and conductor. “I think it’s going to be a memorable collaboration.”

Ballet Northwest collaborated with the symphony four years ago on a program of short works including Camille Saint Saëns’ “Carnival of the Animals” and in February, when five dancers performed “The Rose Waltz,” an excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” at one of the symphony’s concerts.

Playing the light and comedic “Coppelia” is quite a change for the musicians, who played the Brahms Requiem at the symphony’s season-ending concert.

“Not many of the musicians had played the complete ‘Coppelia,’ ” he said. “Really, it’s like we’re getting an extra concert in the series with this.”

The orchestra will be located in the theater’s infrequently used orchestra pit, something that presents a few challenges

The musicians are pretty crowded, Edwards said.

For the dancers, the open pit is a potential hazard.

“Usually, the orchestra pit at The Washington Center for the Performing Arts is covered,” Johnson said. “For this show, it will be open. So there’s a big open space at the front of the stage that the dancers have been mentally preparing for.”

“Coppelia,” with score by Léo Delibes, tells the story of a mechanical doll and her inventor who hopes to bring her to life. It premiered in Paris in 1870.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Ken Johnson said. “It’s a great story with great characters and lots of comedy.”

These sisters are ‘ugly’

“Cinderella,” composed between 1940-1944 by Sergei Prokofiev, follows the storyline of the fairy tale of a girl who suffers after her father remarries. One difference between the ballet and the familiar Walt Disney movie version is that the dancing Cinderella wears not high-heeled glass slippers but elaborately decorated pointe shoes.

The production, which features 115 dancers, gets much of its comic pop from the casting of men as the ugly stepsisters.

“They’re in drag,” said Stephanie Wood-Ennett, co-director of Studio West. “It just brings so much humor to watch the men act out the horribly mean stepsisters. We’ve been rehearsing this since January, and I laugh every time.

“This ballet combines different elements,” she added. “There’s very technical dancing, and then there’s the over-the-top slapstick humor.”

Professional dancers Rhett Powers and Aaron Zeigler will perform the roles, while Nathan Cook, director of the Washington Contemporary Ballet in Tacoma, will dance the prince, as he did in the production four years ago.

“He was very young then,” Wood-Ennett said. “He’s 21 now. He’s a professional dancer, so it’s pretty cool to have him come back.”

This story was originally published April 27, 2016 at 5:40 PM with the headline "Olympia ballet companies prep for spring performances."