NOTE:  This is not the website for Peninsula Ballet Theater.
This is for concerts which took place in 1999.
This page is hosted by Run For Your Life!...it’s a dance company!

Peninsula Ballet Theater presents

Spectrum of Dance '99

Four works by Carlos Carvajal
Two works by Dudley Brooks

Saturday, February 27 at 8:00 pm
Sunday, February 28 at 2:00 pm

Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts
500 Castro Street, Mountain View

Adults $28     Senior/Students $24     Children $20

For Tickets and Information call
(650) 340-9448 or (650) 903-6000

Directions to the Theater

 

Program

Renard    Notturno    The Soldier's Tale
Entre Deux Mondes   Les Sillyphides     Facets

Dancers

Laura Berry     Dudley Brooks     Michelle Brown
Carolyn Carvajal     Sarah Clagett     Dan Craft
André Leavitt     Lee Miller     Carmela Zegarelli Peter
Jeff Ruhser     Gareth Scott     Brittney Wirth

Renard
PBT west coast premiere.  World premiere Dansirs Company, St Louis, January 14, 1989

Choreography:     Carlos Carvajal
Music:     Igor Stravinsky

 This is the barnyard adventure of Renard the Fox, who tries his best to outsmart the gullible Rooster and his companions, the Goat and the Cat.  However, each time he gets the Rooster to jump down from the top of the chicken house and is just about to eat him, the Goat and Cat come to the rescue, finally driving off the poor hungry Fox.

In the history of ballet, Renard was the first ballet that Nijinska choreographed for the Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Paris in 1922, after which she was engaged as ballet mistress for the company.  The last version of this ballet, choreographed by the late Lew Christensen, was performed at the San Francisco Opera House in 1954.  Carlos Carvajal danced the part of the Rooster.

Notturno
World premiere Peninsula Ballet Theater, May 1996

Choreography:     Carlos Carvajal
Music:     Antonin Dvorak

An elegiac ballet in memory of beloved colleagues who have succumbed to AIDS.

Tango/Waltz/Ragtime
from The Soldier's Tale
PBT premier.  World premiere Voices/SF Ensemble, San Francisco, March 6, 1988

Choreography:     Dudley Brooks
Music:     Igor Stravinsky

In 1917 Igor Stravinsky conceived a miniature traveling theatrical piece, The Soldier's Tale, with a folktale theme of a Soldier who sells his soul (symbolized by his violin) to the Devil in exchange for a magic book which shows the future and thereby allows him to become a rich businessman.  During one of his many reversals of fortune the Soldier wins the hand of a Princess by reviving her from her death bed with the help of his music.

In this humorous Roaring '20s silent movie style version of the piece, the Soldier becomes not a businessman but a comically stereotyped gangster.  In this excerpt we see the Soldier romancing the Princess, who is not royalty, but merely a spoiled High Society "princess", and who is languishing from nothing worse than Terminal Boredom.

Entre Deux Mondes
(Between Two Worlds)
PBT premiere.  World premiereNew Shoes, Old Souls, San Francisco, January 13, 1999

Choreography:     Carlos Carvajal
Music:     Maurice Ravel

Valse in C# Minor
from Les Sillyphides
PBT premiere.  World premiere Run For Your Life!, Healdsburg, July 30, 1999

Choreography:     Dudley Brooks (with Rick Nixon)
Music:     Frederic Chopin

Moonlight, sweet perfume on the breeze, the passionate melodies of a waltz, and ... sheer idiocy. The familiar strains of Chopin's music artistically accompanied by the unfamiliar straining of a mutant metamorph.  A dance that proves that anybody can dance -- and we do mean any body!

Les Sillyphides was motivated by a visit to a Big and Tall Men's Shop.  It bears no resemblance to Fokine's original -- except, of course, in its heart-rending (or is it side-splitting?) pathos.

Facets
PBT premiere.  World premiere, San Francisco Ballet, July 14, 1967

Choreography:     Carlos Carvajal
Music:     Francis Poulenc

This is a favorite very early work premiered during the San Francisco Ballet's Ballet '67 season.  It was choreographed shortly after Carlos Carvajal returned from 10 years of dancing in France, touring with the Ballet of the Marquis de Cuevas.  The quickly-changing, multi-faceted music epitomizes the French temperament, sometimes very formal and tradition-bound, other times scintillating and humorous, and finally longing for romance and sentiment.  The setting is the late '20s, when the Charleston was the rage.

This page hosted by
RUN FOR YOUR LIFE ! . . . it's a dance company!

This page Copyright © 1999 by Dudley Brooks
All rights reserved.