• Behind the Scenes

    MCB Insider

    Stay in step with the latest news from Miami City Ballet.

Florida Travel + Life visits MCB

It seems like just yesterday the dancers were posing on the black staircase of the Mondrian South Beach. The January/February issue of Florida Travel and Life will soon go to print and we will be able to see the article about Miami City Ballet, which is sure to include gorgeous photos of our dancers. Ana Connery, Florida Travel and Life Editor In Chief, visited us last week to finalize the story. During the time she spent here she talked to Edward, got a tour of the building and even watched rehearsal!

Click here to read about Ana’s experience with MCB.

The Cover Girl Experience

You’ve seen Jennifer Kronenberg on the cover of Dance Magazine. Now hear what she has to say about the experience! Jennifer, who’s been dancing since she was seven, has dreamed about this all her life.

Come watch our cover girl perform this weekend at Adrienne Arsht Center.

Daniel the Bugle Boy

Daniel Baker is one of the dancers who will perform the role of the Bugle Boy in Company B! This Paul Taylor work will be featured by MCB during Program I, which kicks off at Adrienne Arsht Center on Friday, October 23.

Before you watch Daniel boogie woogie on stage, watch this video about his very exciting role.

Leigh takes you to Chicago – plus Stephen’s exciting experience

Post by Leigh-Ann Esty

Hello everyone! It’s Leigh Esty back with another video installment of Miami City Ballet on tour–this time we traveled to Chicago! I’ll take you from hot Miami weather to chilly temps in the Windy City! You’ll see excerpts of performances, rehearsals and backstage action. Chicago welcomed us with open arms, blessing us with grand applause, full houses and wonderful reviews. This tour was full of exciting moments! Principal Dancer Patricia Delgado got her hands on the Flip and added her commentary during backstage activities. Two of our corps members danced new roles! To say the least, this tour was quite eventful. I hope you enjoy my video journal as much as we enjoyed Chicago!

Stephen Satterfield, MCB Corps de Ballet, had the opportunity to dance a principal role in Symphony in Three Movements on the Chicago tour. Check out this video about his experience.

With the support of the Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners.

Rebecca King documents the Company preparing for opening night

Post by Rebecca King

My name is Rebecca King and I am a member of the Corps de Ballet. This week, the Company gave me the Flip camera and asked me to document the activities that go on while the dancers and staff prepare for opening weekend. I am so excited to take you from the studios to the theater!

While preparing for opening weekend, we spend most of our time working on the ballets that we will be taking to the theater. Everyday our director, Edward Villella, teaches an hour and a half ballet class, which is followed by six hours of rehearsals. Needless to say, it is busy around the studios during this time, but all the dancers are very excited to get into the theater. We all enjoy performing at the Arsht Center here in Miami and appreciate the wonderful audiences who always receive us so warmly.

This week I filmed some rehearsals and other behind the scenes moments that I hope will give you a bit of insight into our studio rehearsal days.

So, the Company is off to the theater on October 22 for a dress rehearsal and I will be taking the camera with me to capture all the exciting moments of our 2009-2010 Season opening weekend!

MCB will be performing Allegro Brillante, Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux, Company B and Symphony in Three Movements at the Adrienne Arsht Center on October 23rd and 24th at 8:00 p.m. and October 25th at 2:00 p.m.

Edward Villella inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Edward Villella was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies and a center for independent policy research.

In the humanities and arts category, the Academy elected Edward to join others such as Civil War historian James McPherson; biographer Robert Caro; author Thomas Pynchon; choreographers Trisha Brown and Bill T. Jones; actors Dustin Hoffman and James Earl Jones; mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne; singer/songwriter Emmylou Harris; and jazz musician Kenny Barron.

The Academy, established in 1780 by founders of the nation, undertakes studies of complex and emerging problems. Current projects focus on science, technology and global security; social policy and American institutions; the humanities and culture; and education. The Academy’s membership of scholars and practitioners from many disciplines and professions gives it a unique capacity to conduct a wide range of interdisciplinary, long-term policy research. Members who have been inducted into the Academy in the past include George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.

At the induction ceremony on Saturday, October 10, Edward gave the following speech:

THE ART OF LIFE

I can divide my life into two distinct periods: life before my exposure to “The Arts” and life after my exposure to “The Arts.” Before the Arts, I was a feisty kid with an abundance of physicality from the blue-collar community of Bayside, Queens. I channeled my physicality into sandlot baseball and high school and college varsity athletics. While attending the New York Maritime College, I gained a higher education in commerce and the military that was added to my constant need to move and be physical. However, it wasn’t until George Balanchine invited me to join his company, New York City Ballet, that I had my first serious exposure to art and a completely different kind of physicality. And what I experienced and learned there utterly transformed my life. I discovered a mind-driven physicality – dance – what Balanchine called “the poetry of gesture.” Once that discovery crossed my horizon and I began my sojourn as a dancer in Balanchine’s singular world, my life was unalterably changed and I never looked back.

As a dancer I could live the Greek ideal of a balanced life of the mind and the body. And I had the rare privilege of working with two of the 20th century’s greatest creative minds – George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky. Their collaborations produced masterpieces, and when I had the opportunity to approach these works as a dancer, I knew I was in the presence of their minds and an articulation of their remarkable genius. That opportunity was both exhilarating and terrifying.

When Balanchine gave me the extraordinary role of Apollo – his and Stravinsky’s Apollo – to prepare for performance, I could not have achieved what I did without first absorbing the wealth of information and experience that he had to impart about his creation. In the time-honored custom of our field, passing knowledge and experience from body to body and mind to mind, the genius thus conveyed to the neophyte his insights and thoughts about the role. Imagine what it was like for me as a young artist, filled with an enormous desire to learn, to be the beneficiary of what the master had to teach me about his Apollo. He provided his points of departure, made sense of abstract gesture, and then, helped me to understand it. During this transmittal of knowledge, Balanchine demonstrated one gesture that was completely revelatory, a gesture that both built a characterization and defined the character of Apollo. A characterization of a choreographic master’s Greek God, ripe with his images of swooping eagles, matadors, chariot drivers, soccer players, and bicycle riders. This process of teaching and learning, giving and receiving, provided me with an artful approach to preparing for my future roles.

As an athlete I could lift. As a dancer I had to lift, but more particularly, to partner and look after another dancer colleague. Partnering is an intimacy of physical conversation. A mutual exchange of dependence and trust – two bodies and two minds working together as one whole.

For the past fifty years, I’ve devoted myself to the art form of dance, particularly classical ballet, first as a dancer, then as a teacher and artistic director. Dance has taught me so many lessons and enriched my life in more ways than I can ever describe. It gave me the ability to speak in silence, to animate movement in the most sophisticated ways, to physicalize music, to see the honesty of Art, to know what is correct, the one possibility that is right. Dance inspired me to seek what is ideal, what is unattainable – perfection. Dance required me to understand human behavior and develop the ability to express it theatrically and to express human relationships in the context of historical period and style and then to link this understanding back to line and form. Dance showed me how to swim in time through designated space with gestures of integrity. Dance taught me how to respond to music with a keen understanding of the intimacies of timing in relation to the architecture of the score. Dance illuminated how abstraction is an idea reduced to its essence and how the physical expression of that essential idea through qualitative entertainment can produce human pleasure. Dance revealed clarity by teaching me to recognize what is not necessary and how to be economical with gesture. Dance taught me how to portray emotion, and in the process, I learned a way to be aware of and help control life’s emotions. Dance gave me discipline and formal structure, but it also gave me the freedom and knowledge to move with artistic ease, removing all tensions in both body and mind. A good life lesson.

Time eventually deprives us of the pleasure of active portrayal. This inevitability, however, provides us with a different type of pleasure and an opportunity to re-pay an accumulated debt. I have traveled a great distance from the position in which I started – that of the neophyte receiving precious information from the master – to one filled with an enormous desire to preserve that information as authentically as possible and to pass it on to the next generations of dancers.

Twenty-five years ago this desire, coupled with my desire to repay a debt to a genius and the teachers and mentors who gave me a life, a life of art, led me to create another entity, Miami City Ballet, as a vehicle to continue sharing with the world what these masters taught.

Fifty years ago, when I started my career as a dancer, it seemed clear to me, as it still does now, that to live with an understanding of music, dance, art, elegance, and nobility could be a point of departure for a life role. The art of life.