Choral Potpourri: Coming Home

 

 

On Saturday evening, I will give a pre-concert lecture for the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra, our local professional symphony. The concert is a program of Russian Masters with not a speck of choral music to be heard. I will be lecturing on two ballet suites, Swan Lake and The Firebird. Though it will be a bit of a change from what I usually do now, in fact, it is coming home for me. In a roundabout way, I am a choral conductor because I was a ballet dancer.

 

As a child, I studied at one of the premier ballet studios in Chicago. Many of their former students went on to have careers with companies such as American Ballet Theatre, Joffrey and the Boston Ballet to name only a few. I sang as well as danced and was a serious piano student….but I loved to dance. I was not the typical ballet dancer; I specialized in character ballet, a specific category of Classical Ballet. Character ballet is stylized versions of traditional folk or national dance, using movements and music which have been adapted for the theater and is very important to the Classical Ballet repertoire. A good example of character ballet within a classical ballet is the series of national dances in the beginning of Act III of Swan Lake or the Divertissements in Act II of The Nutcracker.

 

My father was a professional ballet dancer and when he was in his 40s, I noticed he wasn’t dancing as much as he used to. I always wanted to dance; it was like breathing to me, and wanted to have a long career. But dancers have a limited prime time; how could I continue being involved in ballet professionally as I got older, besides teaching? I began to think about life after dancing; and since I was also a musician, decided perhaps I could become a ballet conductor. When I was 13, I mentioned this aspiration to one of my ballet teachers…..and he laughed at me. He told me girls didn’t conduct orchestras (when I mentioned a very prominent female opera conductor, he told me I didn’t want to be like her) but thought perhaps I could conduct choruses. Not a very auspicious beginning for a choral career, I suppose. The summer I was 16, just after dancing for the director of a very prominent ballet company, I fell down a flight of cement stairs and wrecked my ankle, thus ending my dancing career. But it was okay.

 

Ballet has always been in my life, even after my ankle injury. I taught seven ballet classes a week to earn money to get through my undergrad music program. When I graduated from college, I began to think of myself as a musician and choral conductor, not a dancer, but dancing wasn’t finished with me! When I needed a job or relocated due to my spouse’s job, a job teaching at a ballet studio or a choreography gig often fell into my lap. I always had fun but felt a bit, well, overqualified and wanted to move on to my *real* work which was choral conducting. I added liturgical dance to my choral repertoire when applying for church jobs after someone asked in an interview about my ballet studio positions, and did some sacred dance work too.

 

When I was in music school, I became fascinated with music history as it relates to dance history; I became hooked. I love how things line up with music, dance, art and history. So lecturing about ballet on Saturday isn’t too far from my interests. I plan to drag out my Pointe shoes and show folks how something that seems to make you float on air are actually pretty hard (banging the toes on a table is a great way to get the “pointe” across!). I will bring my character shoes and perhaps demonstrate a bit of the Danse hongraise and Czardas from Act III of Swan Lake if my feet are feeling it. I will feel comfortable and relaxed and happy because I will be coming home. But I don’t live there any longer.