About The Performance

On Sept. 11, Colorado Ballet will open its 49th season with a lively Colorado themed program that will be presented in four Colorado cities throughout the coming fall. All Pointes West begins with Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s Great Galloping Gottschalk. Commissioned by Mikhail Baryshnikov for American Ballet Theatre, Taylor-Corbett choreographed the light-hearted and often humorous work to music by composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Next on the program will be the third act pas de deux from Marius Petipa’s Sleeping Beauty featuring the wedding pas de deux, followed by Dwight Rhoden’s Ave Maria. The program will conclude with Agnes de Mille’s iconic Rodeo, set to the Aaron Copland score. Rodeo follows a young cowgirl on her quest to prove she is as good as any man working on the ranch, along with her pursuit for true love. Beginning at the Newman Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Denver, the Company will then head to Colorado Springs, Fort Collins and Pueblo. 

Videos

Click HERE to catch a sneak peek of Rodeo.

About the Ballets

Great Galloping Gottschalk

New Orleans-born composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) began playing piano at the age of four, and gave his public debut at eleven. Although he was rebuffed from the Paris Conservatory (his examiner reportedly remarked with disdain, “America is a country of steam engines”), he pursued private lessons and went on to become one of the first internationally acclaimed American pianists. Gottschalk toured extensively. Female fans were known to faint at his appearance, and followers competed to retrieve his white playing gloves after a performance. At forty, Gottschalk collapsed after playing his Morte (Death) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and died shortly thereafter. More than one hundred years later, Mikhail Baryshnikov, then artistic director of American Ballet Theatre in New York, invited choreographer and Denver-native Lynne Taylor-Corbett to create a new work for the company. Her search for inspiration led her to a local record store, where Taylor-Corbett says “one cover jumped out at [her] purely because of its vibrant colors. It was the piano music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk.When I listened to the music later I thought, ‘No, no, it’s too simple,’” she explains. “The tunes, however, would not leave me alone and eventually I had to surrender to their whimsy and uncanny power.” Taylor-Corbett chose Gottschalk’s Souvenirs de Porto Rico, The Dying Poet, Tournament Galop, La Savane, Oh Ma Charmante, Le Bananier, and La Mancheiga for the score. Great Galloping Gottschalk premiered at the Miami Beach Theatre of the Performing arts in January 1982. Beginning that year, Colorado Ballet Artistic Director Gil Boggs performed in Great Galloping Gottschalk with American Ballet Theatre. “It’s all about the comedy,” Boggs notes. “It’s fun to be funny.”

 

The Sleeping Beauty (Act III Wedding Pas de Deux)

Based on Charles Perrault’s 1697 La Belle au Bois Dormant (The Beauty Asleep in the Wood), and the Brother’s Grimm’s 1812 variant Briar Rose, the ballet scenario was conceived by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, then director of the Imperial Theatres in St. Petersburg. Vsevolozhsky approached Tchaikovsky to collaborate with Imperial Ballet Master Marius Petipa, now called the “Father of Classical Ballet.” Although Tchaikovsky’s first ballet score, The Lake of the Swans, was met with little enthusiasm in 1877, as audiences were not accustomed to symphonic ballets (the Swan Lake score was called “undanceable”), The Sleeping Beauty was much better received, despite its length – four hours with intermissions. It would be performed by the Imperial Ballet over 200 times in the next ten years. Tchaikovsky and Petipa would join forces again on The Nutcracker in 1892, and in 1895, two years after Tchaikovsky’s death, Petipa revived Swan Lake as a tribute to the composer, with help from Riccardo Drigo.

 

Ave Maria

“There is nothing timid about Mr. Rhoden’s choreography,” reported The New York Times’ Jack Anderson after seeing Ave Maria in 1997. A duet taken from Rhoden’s larger work The Grapes of Wrath (1995), Ave Maria explores spirituality and sensuality. “You don’t always see religion and sensuality in the same duet,” Rhoden told critic Glenn Giffin in 2001. “I always though the church had a sensual nature to it, and this is my interpretation.”  The music is attributed to early Baroque composer Giulio Caccini, although it is assumed that this Ave Maria is in truth the work of Russian Vladimir Vavilov, composed around 1970 during the Early Music Revival in the Soviet Union. Rhoden played flute, clarinet and drums before discovering dance in high school at Dayton Contemporary Dance Company. He went on to dance for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, and started his own company, Complexions, with Desmond Richardson in 1994. A year later the company earned the coveted New York Times Critics Choice Award. More recent accomplishments include an appearance on popular dance television show “So You Think You Can Dance”.

 

Rodeo

Agnes de Mille was born in Harlem to a family of playwrights and film directors (her uncle was Cecil B. de Mille). Although she would go on to shape musical theatre, she was told she was “not pretty enough” for acting and “too fat” to dance. Still, de Mille was determined to pursue her passion. After graduating cum laude from UCLA, she studied alongside greats Frederick Ashton and Antony Tudor at Rambert Ballet Club in London, and her early choreographic work was met with critical acclaim, though she struggled to make ends meet. In 1940, de Mille joined Ballet Theatre and created her first ballet for the company, Black Ritual, with African-American dancers. In 1942 she was invited to create an “American” work on the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. Rodeo, with music by Aaron Copland, was an instant success. De Mille danced the role of the Cowgirl, which she fashioned after herself, and was subsequently rather particular about who took on the role.

Copland was originally reluctant to compose “another cowboy ballet,” after his first effort, the highly successful Billy the Kid. De Mille, however, was able to persuade him, and the score, particularly the “Hoedown” portion, is one of the most enduring and recognizable works by an American composer. Upon the success of Rodeo, de Mille was asked by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein to choreograph the Dream Ballet in the musical Oklahoma!. Her Broadway contributions also include Carousel (1945), Brigadoon (1947), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1949) and Paint Your Wagon (1951).

 

Run Time

Including all intermissions, the expected run time for this production is two hours, although when it comes to making reservations, etc., we always suggest you add an extra half hour to the run time to ensure that you have plenty of time.