FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 27, 2006
CONTACT: Mark Fleisher, 401.353.1129
Providence, RI -
| Program: | Winter Passion |
| Date: | February 9-11, 2007 |
| Time: | Friday at 7:30, Saturday at 7:30, and Sunday at 2:30 pm |
| Place: | VMA Arts & Cultural Center, 1 Avenue of the Arts, Providence, RI |
| Cost: | $17-$62.00, price includes $2.00 VMA Facility Fee. Discounts for Groups, children and seniors; $40 family 4-pack. |
| Program: | World premiere of Gianni Di Marco’s El Amor Brujo, with his Schéhérazade |
| Information | Vist www.festivalballet.com , for tickets contact VMA 401.272.4VMA, Tickets.com, or 800.919.6272. |
PROVIDENCE, RI –
Festival Ballet Providence artistic director Mihailo Djuric announces Winter Passion, the company’s Valentine’s Day double bill featuring two passion-filled works by Gianni Di Marco, the Boston-based choreographer who created Azucar for the company in 2006.
The program opens with Schéhérazade, commissioned by Festival Ballet Providence for its 27th season, and closes with Di Marco’s newest work, the world premiere of El Amor Brujo.
Schéhérazade is the story of a jealous sultan who fears his harem is unfaithful in his absence. The ambiguous relationship between his newest acquisitions, Princess Zobeide as his most beautiful wife, and the strong-willed Golden Slave, is his most immediate concern. Based on the original Ballet Russes storyline that caused a sensation when it premiered in Paris in 1910, and set to Rimsky-Korsakov’s evocative masterpiece, Schéhérazade is a visual feast, complete with harem girls, slaves, love, infidelity and revenge.
Di Marco removed the mime incorporated in traditional productions of Schéhérazade, and replaced it with movement that physically express the narrative and drives the story’s dramatic twists and turns. The main characters are introduced at the outset of the story to better establish their relationships to each other, and to bring more stirring drama to the ballet’s conclusion. Sets design is by Alan Pickart and original costumes were designed by Ka Yan Kan.
As noted in the Providence Journal when describing the major pas de deux between the Golden Slave and the Princess, “The choreography is creative and complex, and the execution is excellent. Their series of movements -- on the floor and in the air -- are seamless and seductive, and sincerely expressed… There's no evil sultan, no evil sultan's brother, no harem girls, no soldiers, no other slaves, and no eunuch. It's just them, and that's plenty. When their mesmerizing dance is done, it's almost startling to see all these other characters return.”
The Providence Phoenix review distinguished Schéhérazade for “the sensuality that drenches the movement at every turn” and continued, “…the ballet itself is beautiful, in the sinuous arcs of the harem girls’ arms, in the high leaps by Zeman, in the dramatic gestures of the eunuch and in the lovely and tender 10-minute pas de deux between Zobeide and her Golden Slave.”
The second half of the program is the world premiere of Di Marco’s newest creation for Festival Ballet Providence, El Amor Brujo. Set to the masterpiece by Spanish composer Manuel de Falla, El Amor Brujo is a sultry and distinctive orchestral work inspired by gypsy legends. The plot is simple: a woman is possessed by the ghost of her faithless former lover, until her new suitor enlists a gorgeous friend to entice the phantom away. But while the story is simple, the opportunities for creating a captivating dance work with ghost and magic are many.
De Marco, who still performs on occassion and runs Boston Ballet’s City Dance program, noted, “When I created Schéhérazade for Festival Ballet Providence in 2005, I envisioned a piece that used a more sensual and accessible movement vocabulary to tell what is an incredibly passionate and tragic story, and make each character’s actions completely believable to the extent that everyone in the audience would in some way identify with each. Pretty ambitious, no? especially when this is an intensely dramatic story told only through the movement, and was my largest work to date! But with Misha’s trust and support, I think I was able to deliver exactly what I had envisioned.”
“With El Amor Brujo, it’s a story where the magic is as much about love and passion as it is about ghosts and wizards. Again it’s the human element of two people’s love for each other that resonates with me, as I am honestly quite passionate about life. So I really want the magic from these gypsy stories to be just as powerful in the romance as it is in the otherworldly characters. El Amor Brujo has a much happier outcome than Schéhérazade, so I’m sure audiences will enjoy the contrast of the two works sharing the same program."
Djuric, who is counting on Mr. Di Marco to create a ballet that contrasts his earlier work,
adds, “I have created a tradition of love and passion as a theme for our February programs, as they come so close to Valentine’s Day. It’s not only a great, romantic way to celebrate a wonderful holiday with someone you care about, but it’s also a great way to warm up what can be a cold, grim time of year. Gianni’s movement style, with his roots in the tropical climate of South America, is anything but grim! It’s sensual and expressive, and translates beautifully in these two productions. Even those who have never seen dance will understand both ballets, and I am sure anyone who ventures in from the cold will certainly be warmed by this program!”
Festival Ballet Providence performs Winter Passion February 9th, 10th and 11th, 2007, at VMA Arts and Cultural Center. Performance times are 7:30 pm on Friday and Saturday, and 2:30 pm on Sunday. Ticket prices start at $17, with discounts available for children 12 and under, seniors and groups. Introductory Family 4-packs are available in row U to Row Y for only $40. Student rush tickets available at half-price one hour before curtain, with current
student ID.
For tickets contact Tickets.com online or at 800.919.6272, or contact the VMA Box Office Tuesday to Friday, 401.272.4862.
Supporters of this production include: season television sponsor NBC10, the VMA Arts and Cultural Center, and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.
For further details about the program and other offerings, call Festival Ballet Providence, 401.353.1129 or visit www.festivalballet.com.
zFestival Ballet Providence and the Festival Ballet Providence Center for Dance Education are together a not-for-profit arts organization whose EIN is 05-0377245 and whose Rhode Island Corporate ID number is ND-27-137. VMA Arts and Cultural Center is handicapped accessible.
Synopsis
Schéhérazade
Schéhérazade is the story of Sultan Shayhryar, a wealthy man with numerous wives in his harem and slaves under his control. His new, beautiful young wife, Zobeida, sees a newly acquired slave beaten. On seeing the slave mistreated, she feels her emotions stirred with sympathy. The Sultan’s brother Zeman implies that his new wife, Zobeida, has been unfaithful, and convinces the Sultan to leave his harem under the pretense of going on a hunting trip. Soon after their departure, the ladies of the harem urge the chief eunuch to release the slaves. Zobeida chooses the slave she had seen earlier, the most handsome, dressed in gold, the Golden Slave, and together they become the central point of a frenzied dance celebrating their short-lived freedom. The revelry is interrupted by the Sultan’s unexpected return. In his rage, he orders all to be killed, and no one escapes. The only one spared, Zobeida asks for forgiveness, and the Sultan in return asks if she has been unfaithful. Finding herself still in love with the Golden Slave and unable to imagine a life with the Sultan, she stabs herself with a dagger and falls at the Sultan’s feet.
Gianni Di Marco ( Bio)
Gianni Di Marco, a native of Venezuela, began his dance training in 1981, in the Professional Division of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School in Canada. He has also studied with The National Ballet of Canada, the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, and in Banff. He joined Royal Winnipeg Ballet in 1988, and was was promoted to second soloist in 1990 and then first soloist the following year. He joined Boston Ballet in 1995, retiring in 2005. Mr. Di Marco has also danced with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens and Germany’s Oper Leipzig Ballet. Providence audiences have been delighted by his guest appearance with Festival Ballet Providence, including Gamache in Don Quixote and the King in The Princess and the Pea.
He has created a number of works for a variety of institutions throughout the region, including many Boston Ballet fundraising galas, Dance on the Top Floor, and Raw Dance. Mr. DiMarco’s short works Killing Time, Amphibious Love and Gracias a La Vida have been performed for Festival Ballet Providence’s Up CLOSE, on HOPE series. His previous commissions by Festival Ballet Providence include Schéhérazade (2005) and Azucar (2006).
Di Marco was named Principal of CityDance in 2005, Boston Ballet’s outreach program which affects over 4,000 Boston public school children a year, and also teaches Boston Ballet’s Adaptive Dance Program, created for children with Downs Syndrome. He shares his life with his wife Adriana Suarez and their two children.
SCHEHERAZADE REVIEWS from February 2005:
Scheherazade takes off at Festival Ballet
By Bryan Rourke
The Providence Journal
Saturday February 12, 2005
One duet does it.
The sets aren't strong; the dancing is.
Jennifer Ricci and Davide Vittorino are stupendous in Scheherazade. It's part of Festival Ballet Providence's twin-bill of one-act works: Scheherazade & Con Amore, which opened last night at Veterans Memorial Auditorium and runs through tomorrow.
The production, created by artistic director Mihailo Djuric, pays tribute to Valentine's Day with two tales of love. One is short and comic (Con Amore). The other is long and tragic (Scheherazade).
Neither has any real sets to speak of, just costumes -- designed by Ka Yan Kan -- to convey roles and plots. Dancers do the rest.
The best comes last. That's Scheherazade. Gianni Di Marco of Boston Ballet choreographed this world premiere production, adapting the 1910 Ballet Russes version, filling it with drama, energy and, at times, unorthodoxy.
Scheherazade is the story of a princess and a slave. Ricci is the princess, Zobeida. Vittorino is the slave, known as Golden Slave. The princess loves the slave. The slave loves the princess. Their dance delivers that.
The choreography is creative and complex, and the execution is excellent. Their series of movements -- on the floor and in the air -- are seamless and seductive, and sincerely expressed. Ricci wears fiery red -- shimmering tights and a belly dancer's halter top, exposing her taut stomach. She moves sensuously, lithely, ethereally. Vittorino wears short shorts. That's it. He's a slave, a fashion minimalist, who moves powerfully, athletically, dramatically.
Midway through the production, after all the characters have been introduced, it's just Ricci and Vittorino alone on stage, dancing for more than eight moving minutes. There's no evil sultan, no evil sultan's brother, no harem girls, no soldiers, no other slaves, and no eunuch.
It's just them, and that's plenty. When their mesmerizing dance is done, it's almost startling to see all these other characters return.
Before and after the duet, you've got grace (harem girls); you've got brawn (soldiers and slaves); and you've got odd (a eunuch). Ty Parmenter plays that part. He stands like a hieroglyphic Egyptian. He mountain climbs on the floor. He plays peekaboo with his face. He acts strange. The eunuch serves as a counterbalance to the tension. This is a tragedy. You know someone's going to get killed. But his dances are just a little out of character with the rest of the ballet.
Scheherazade, with rich and sumptuous music by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, lasts about 40 minutes, and comes after a 20-minute intermission.
That's Amore
Festival Ballet's newest project explores the ins and outs of love through the medium of dance
By Anna Kukowski
The Cowl, Providence College
Thursday, February 17, 2005
The tone switches considerably after intermission with Gianni Di Marco's Schéhérazade-its Festival Ballet's second world premier this season. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's classically chilling music both charms and haunts the awaiting audience. The shrill main violin immediately offers a foreshadowing of deadly romance. Ricci is cast as the unhappy harem. Her movement is wonderfully drawn out, sensual, seductive, and ultimately saddened by her doomed fate.
Festival goes a little PG-13 on this choreography-Ricci yearns for attention. Pas des deux among the corps is as sensual as well, mirroring Ricci's own movement. Unfortunately, unlike the corps of Amazons in the first act, male dancers lack their unity and precision in Schéhérazade, which is distracting for the viewer. Ostaktsov dances a solid sultan, and Ricci and Vittorino dance beautifully. The wonderful movement paired with haunting musical qualities ends the evening on a bittersweet note.
Toe to Toe
Romance is in the air at Festival Ballet
BY Johnette, Rodriguez
Issue Date: February 11 - 17, 2005
The Providence Phoenix
Schéhérazade is a change in mood, not only because of the somber outcome of a stolen love but because of the sensuality that drenches the movement at every turn. The story involves a sultan and his harem and the sultan’s brother (Zeman), who informs him of an affair between his favorite wife Zobeide and one of the slaves. A trap is set, the lovers are caught and the consequences are not pretty.
But the ballet itself is beautiful, in the sinuous arcs of the harem girls’ arms, in the high leaps by Zeman, in the dramatic gestures of the eunuch and in the lovely and tender 10-minute pas de deux between Zobeide and her Golden Slave.”
Boston Ballet company member and a choreographer for their cutting-edge Raw Dance series, Gianni Di Marco spoke during a rehearsal break about his interpretation of what had been a standard piece in the repertory of the Ballet Russe. "I made the duet with Zobeide and the Golden Slave more intimate, a little sexually avant-garde, because we live in a different age now. People see reality shows and want to be part of it. I wanted this to be as if the audience saw themselves involved in this relationship, for them to relate to it more.
"In trying to bring emotional feeling into movement, you have to make the dancers understand what it is about," Di Marco emphasized. "A rainbow has to have different colors. This time you have to feel sad; this time you have to feel happy. I want to create dancers who are well-rounded and true to the art form."
And if everything is not tied up in neat bows at the end of a ballet such as Schéhérazade, that’s part of Gianni’s intent: "It’s important to go home thinking about it. We live in a society where everything has to be instant coffee. It’s nice to live with a question, because we don’t usually want to try to figure it out."
So why not ponder all of this with that special someone in your life?
Scheherazade & Con Amore: Two sides of love at Vets
By Bryan Rourke
The Providence Journal
Thursday, February 10, 2005
Look at love. Yes, it's romantic, but also comic and tragic -- and taking the stage at Veterans Memorial Auditorium.
This weekend, Festival Ballet Providence presents its annual ode to Valentine's Day. This year, the program is Scheherazade & Con Amore, a twin bill of one-act works. One elicits laughter, the other tears.
"It's a good match ..." says Mihailo Djuric, Festival's artistic director. "They're opposites in a good sense." Together, Djuric says, the productions portray a more complete picture of the complexity of love. And now, he says, is finally the right time to present that.
"I had been planning this for years," Djuric says. "But every season was not the right season." Djuric's plan began with Con Amore. The 1953 ballet, considered a comic masterpiece, was created by the late Lew Christensen of the San Francisco Ballet. It's a farce about infidelity, which turns into amorous serendipity. "It's light and short," Djuric says.
To complement the piece, Djuric sought something heavier and longer. He chose Scheherazade, which he calls "dramatic and powerful." The ballet is based on an ancient Persian tale. A woman marries a king who has a custom of killing all his wives a day after marriage. That way, the king reasons, they won't cheat on him. His latest bride saves herself by telling interesting stories, enthralling the king, keeping him from killing her.
Djuric likes the ballet, which is being adapted from the 1910 Ballet Russes version. All he needed was a choreographer. "I just thought, Gianni Di Marco," Djuric says. "It's him."
Festival has previously used Di Marco's choreography. In 2003, for its "Up Close, On Hope" dance series, Festival performed Di Marco's Killing Time, a fun and funny work involving two male dancers who hopped around like rabbits. Djuric recalls other Di Marco choreography, which he calls "strange, almost weird." Djuric likes that.
"You cannot do things the same way every time," he says. "It gets boring. It should always be fresh."
Timing and miming
Di Marco, 41, is the oldest member of the Boston Ballet. This is his first time choreographing a story ballet, which happens to have a celebrated history. And he's going to tamper with it. "I'm rearranging how I see the story," Di Marco says. "You have to think like this, to innovate and make audiences more involved." What was interesting and provocative in 1910, Di Marco says, isn't necessarily so now. For instance, he says, nine minutes of music with no dancing doesn't do much for him. That's the work's original prologue, and that's where Di Marco begins to make his mark.
Bring on the dancers, and the enlightenment. Di Marco wants his audiences to understand Scheherazade before it's supposed to begin. He wants to show them who loves whom, and why. "At the end, there is this drama of people killing each other," he says. "In the traditional version, it is not explained." Di Marco offers an early explanation. In his version, while the prologue music plays, out come some characters: a slave woman, Zobeide, along with a few other slaves, one of whom, a man known as Golden Slave is beaten. "She pities him and comforts him," Di Marco says. "In the process, she falls in love with him." In the original ballet, audiences see Zobeide and Golden Slave in love, without offering substantiation for their mutual infatuation.
Another change Di Marco has made is removing all the miming from the production. In the original, the king, Sultan Shahriar and his brother Shah Zeman don't dance. They mime, excessively, like silent movie actors. Call him crazy, but Di Marco thought a dance production should involve dancing. "I wanted everyone to be dancing and projecting mood through movement," he says.
Di Marco, who now lives in Boston, has lived in Venezuela, Italy, Germany and Canada, among other places. He has learned many languages. He has danced in many cultures. Never has he resorted to mime. "Dance is an international language that has no boundaries," he says. "Physicality is something that speaks to all minds. There's never a doubt people understand. Dance can touch people without having to say one word." The style of dance that Di Marco favors is energetic. "It doesn't stop. It's always moving, like chaos. It's one thing after the next."
Stronger roles
Other modifications Di Marco has made to Scheherazade include making the role of the sultan's brother stronger than in the original, and giving prominence to the previously emasculated role of the eunuch. "He's kind of like the butler of the kingdom," he says. "That's how I see him. In my version, he is a jester and a storyteller." The reason for all the changes, Di Marco says, is that since 1910, "dance has evolved. I'm working in a more contemporary era."
