Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: David Sanders with the Ozark Ballet Theater joins us today on the WhatsApp podcast to talk about their upcoming performance of Cinderella, which will be on stage at 07:00 p.m. April 26 and 02:00 p.m. April 27. This is the largest production and the first production by oBT in Benton county.
Thank you for joining me today, David.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Monica.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: So the last time I spoke to you, you and your lovely wife Katie were raising money to build a studio for Ozark ballet theater. How is that going?
[00:00:46] Speaker B: Well, we're sitting in right now the, I mean, I'm sitting in the office. Well, my office has, has actually just become the room where I make all of our costumes.
So yeah, it's going quite well. We are now in a 6000 square foot facility in Bentonville right at airport and I Street. We moved in here back in September.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Wonderful, wonderful. And how is enrollment? I know you were talking about how increasing the number of enrollment meant you could do more scholarships. Have you been able to continue that outreach?
[00:01:24] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. So I believe last time we spoke we had maybe 40, 50 students. Right now we're up to 70. We keep about 30% of our students on full scholarship and it's needs based.
And actually our next fundraising push is going to be we kind of need to build out this facility a little bit more. And we've done all of this so far with a team of two doing costuming production and everything else.
So we're gonna, we're gonna, we're looking at hiring and then basically with one more large space in our studio we could double our capacity. So we wanna move to between 120 and 140 students with about 40 of those on full scholarship.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Nice. All right. And you said just a staff of two. That's you and your wife Katie, of course, right?
[00:02:20] Speaker B: Correct. Yes. And what we've done is we have a very high standard for how classes are taught even with our youngest kids. So we've actually started a teacher training program for our advanced dancers, the ones who like it and who seem to really click well with kids. So we have them being paid to teach for us under our supervision so that we can free up a little bit of our time in the future. But yeah, it's certainly time for more staff for our big building here.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: How's the class schedules going over there?
[00:03:03] Speaker B: We are here, basically we're here from now till 09:00 five days a week. And then, and then here for 6 hours on Saturdays.
Total zoo all the time. We've got full classes back to back to back. I believe my wife right now is. I mean, she's teaching more hours just by herself than some schools and organizations offer, total. So, yeah, it's been fun.
But one glance at my office here would show you that it's definitely time to get another eye on the operation.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: Gotcha. So tell me about your upcoming production of Cinderella. What can the audience expect to see on stage?
[00:03:56] Speaker B: Okay, so this ballet.
This ballet was originally presented in the Soviet Union in 1945.
I mean, Prokofiev wrote half of it from a bomb shelter, and that sort of creative spirit in the face of just an absolute worldwide mess, created this ballet that is. I mean, it's a comedy ballet.
It's just what the world needed. Then it launched the careers of some of the most famous ballerinas of all time.
And our version is an adaptation of that made by Vadim Fedotov, who's from Kiev.
And I had never seen it. My wife had performed it a dozen times.
She was talking about doing Cinderella, and I'm like, okay, you know, it's Cinderella. Cinderella, Cinderella.
Finally, she showed me a video, and I'll tell you what, I was laughing hysterically, like, edge to edge. It is a lot of physical comedy. Of course, there's gorgeous sections with Cinderella, with the prince, and we're bringing in quite a few professional dancers to fill those roles.
But it's our largest production ever. It's a two hour show in three acts, and it's just gonna be magic.
We're really excited to start ramping it up.
[00:05:34] Speaker A: And when I talked to you before, I believe your wife told me that she trained with Vadim Fedov, right?
[00:05:43] Speaker B: Correct? Yes. So she trained with he and his wife, Irina Depler. And they were. Was a choreographer and principal dancer at the National Theatre in Kiev, and she was the principal dancer there for many, many years.
They moved to the US, I think, in 2000.
And so she received most of her training from them throughout her life and then would go on to be his principal dancer in his company.
And, you know, currently, Vadim's choreography is actually on tour with the. With the National Ballet of Kiev.
A show he produced just before he passed is fundraising right now for the war efforts in Ukraine.
And, I mean, so he was just a prolific, amazing man. And so when he passed, she was left his entire repertoire of work.
And so we've been kind of digging into it more and more. It's been a ton of fun, and we've found some just amazing things.
We're having a lot of fun with it.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: And Katie's gonna be on stage for this ballet as well as you, right?
[00:06:56] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, we always are.
We're keeping it into some character comedy roles.
You might see a fairy godmother at a Katie and I'll be playing the king. You know, it's always good to be the king.
So, again, it's a lot of comedy for me. It's so much. It's really great to get to share the stage with these students and stuff. I'm really glad I started a school before I got too old to get on stage. You know what I mean?
[00:07:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And you don't normally think about comedy and ballet together.
You know, it's definitely something you think about with musicals and, you know, things like that, but I don't. That's not the first thing that comes to mind with ballet, even though there might be funny parts in the ballet.
Yeah.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: And Cinderella was originally this version, the Prokofiev, was originally choreographed as a comedy.
There's a name for it. It's fancy in French, and it's slipping my mind at the moment. But, you know, I would say about half of the ballets in the classical repertoires were choreographed as comedies.
There's. To me, physical comedy is just.
I mean, it's just the basis of humor, and getting an audience to laugh without ever saying anything to them is such a challenge that I came from a musical theater background as a teenager, before I started dancing. And the most gratifying laughs you'll get is the ones where you never had to say anything. You just got to show them. And it was funny. You know what I mean?
[00:08:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
So while we're still talking about it, for our readers who are listeners who are unfamiliar with you, can you give us a little bit of your background real quick?
[00:08:55] Speaker B: Right. So Ozark ballet theater or mine?
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Yours. Your professional experience.
[00:09:02] Speaker B: So I came to dance a little bit late, though. Men get to start a little later because it's just an easier world for us without the point shoes and things. I started when I was about 16 in Texas, and it got me a lot of opportunities.
I didn't have to pay tuition because I was in a school like Ozark ballet theater.
And honestly, it kept me out of trouble and got me out of a lot of things. You know, it put my life on a better course.
And so I got to study at University of Arizona. I got to in a touring ballet company. I had a really fun ten years as a freelance dancer, just traveling all over the country, dancing with everybody. And when my wife and I were looking for a place to settle down and raise our family. I remembered northwest Arkansas, a place I had visited many years ago. And we came out here.
We had always thought we would start a school, but we saw that there was no nonprofit ballet school like the ones her and I had come up in. And so we decided we needed to do it here, because if I had grown up in northwest Arkansas, I wouldn't have known that I could dance. I wouldn't have known that it was a possibility for me to be a classical ballet dancer. And that's sad and hard to think about. So we're just trying to turn that around and make it a thing here, you know?
[00:10:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
So tell me about your dancers, your local dancers who will be in this production.
How large is the cast?
[00:10:40] Speaker B: Oh, boy. We have 68 local dancers in the cast at last count.
So those will be. Yeah, those will be our students who are here, not including my wife and I.
They are between three and 17 years old.
We've got more dancers than ever are dancing or will be presenting on point.
We have a really great core of advanced dancers who have come a really long way as physical actors as well as dancers. Just during the production of this show, we are in the studio just laughing every single day. It's fantastic.
[00:11:26] Speaker A: And you brought in some guest artists for this one as well, too.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
So the whole roster hasn't been announced quite yet. We have Alexi Minken. Alexei is from the perm ballet school, which is actually in Siberia, and it's related to our own pedagogy. So they studied the Veganova method there. We teach the veganova method here.
Alexei is somebody I've worked with as a freelance dancer before.
Gorgeous dancer, wonderful partner. He's going to come in and be our prince.
Alexei, I was hoping to have him on this interview today. Just had to. He had something come up, and he's based out of Miami right now, but he had a long career in Russia, and then he was principal dancer at multiple company, at multiple national companies throughout South America before moving to. To Florida with his wife. They've actually just had a child and.
Amazing guy with a lot of cool stories. Like I said, a beautiful dancer, but he speaks five languages, and he actually has a huge following on his own spanish language YouTube channel.
[00:12:42] Speaker A: Oh, okay. Well, some of our spanish speakers should check that out.
I saw in his biography that he's also a teacher. Is he going to be offering any instruction to local students or just dancing?
[00:12:57] Speaker B: So, as, you know, performers and guest artists, we actually really enjoy teaching other people's students, our guest artists, when they're in town, are usually asked or they usually ask to teach a class. So I expect we'll see him teaching a little bit, and then we are talking about bringing him in for the summer. Perhaps we're just a little bit behind on that, seeing where the budget is. But we have some, an amazing roster of, like, international dance stars that we would love to have come teach the kids if given the resources are made available.
[00:13:30] Speaker A: Okay. All right. And what about Cinderella? Who's, do you know who's going to dance that role yet?
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Okay, you get the scoop here.
And this isn't that. We have not totally confirmed this.
A student of my wife's who danced.
Geez, how long have we known her? I think we taught her when she was seven through ten years old back in Florida. She's 15 now. And this role is just, it's incredibly difficult and very, very involved. Well, she has become a little bit of a prodigy, and she recently danced the role. So we were talking, as we frequently do, to Irina Vadim's wife and looking for a Cinderella, and he suggested her. I mean, she suggested her and sent us some videos of her performing the role. And we're like, yeah, that's perfect. So not something we normally do, but we're actually bringing in a 15 year old student to perform this role just based on her incredible level of skill.
[00:14:50] Speaker A: When you bring in these professional dancers, how do you think that accentuates your students path of learning there at the studio?
[00:15:02] Speaker B: I appreciate the question. So, you know, it's, again, it's something I grew up. We always had, you know, well known dancers, and it also helps the economy for the dancers. But we always had them around. And, you know, no matter how much I tell the kids about acting like a professional, about the discipline and about what it takes to be a professional dancer, you know, it's like it brings in all of that comes into context when we have these performers in town. So they see them go to work, they see them taking care of their bodies, they see them being respectful. They see all of the qualities that would get them a job, not only in classical ballet, but anywhere in their life.
And they get to experience that firsthand. And there are so many roles in this show in particular.
Almost every role is a soloist role.
And so when you're performing with these people, we also have Doug Horn, Polina Zitsuke. We've got some amazing dancers who are very well known. When you're performing with these people in the show, you're an equal to them.
You're just as important to the show. And having that realization that you are being given that much responsibility has been. I see just a lot of character development in the kids from it. It was important for me.
You have your teacher every day shouting stuff in your ear, and it's just like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, man, I get it. But then to see it and then to be a part of it and experience it, we always end up with a more serious, disciplined bunch that also see the professionals goofing around with each other and hanging out and stuff. And so I feel like the kids kind of learn to take the work seriously without taking themselves seriously, and it's a ton of fun.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: Wonderful. Okay, so you have two performances of the ballet that are coming up on April 27 and April 27 at Bentonville West High School. And can you tell me a little bit about the sets and the costumes that we can expect to see?
[00:17:28] Speaker B: Okay. Yes.
So we've had a fun couple of weeks regarding costuming, and I'm going to send you some pictures. This is not a professional photo shoot. We just. We got some. We got some cool pieces, and we had to get them shot. We had to get them on some students and take some pictures. So, actually, there's one right behind me here.
We just stumbled upon a collection of soviet era costumes from the Kyiv national Ballet.
[00:18:02] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: It's a well known collection. There was an article about it in the New York Times recently, and the woman who owns it was trying to sell. So just like us and every other ballet school in the US, we just started messaging her. Well, it turns out she grew up dancing with arena and Vadim.
So big shout out to miss Tatiana Mazur. She held them for us. I did a quick fundraiser, and I got about a third of the ones that we really, really wanted to get. I would love to take the whole collection. And, I mean, some of these costumes are just absolutely stunning.
Made with materials we cannot get today.
All handmade, a lot of it hand stitched, where I would use a machine.
So we're rushing to get those ready to go on some of the dancers so that'll be presented.
I am in the middle of, you know, we.
We have really high standards for production and competition. Dance has kind of taken, has kind of become a big money game. And all of the costumers who used to make, you know, 20 costumes for a quarter ballet for $80 each have realized that they can charge dance moms $1,500 for the same stretch, like gratuitous, over and over and over again.
That's not, those tutus aren't supportive. They're not good for all body types, and we are extremely body positive around here. So last September, I started teaching myself to make costumes.
It's gotten better and better. It's not a thing I maybe had time for, but I've taken to digitally measuring the students and doing 3d design for classically built tutus for them. It's a little old meets new. So I'm making them in the classical imperial russian style for all the dancers. And then my sets, I am.
We have our own backdrops that we have made for these sets with custom art.
I am building a whole lot of big, giant wooden rolling pieces.
Sorry, everybody. It's just not worth it for me to build a carriage.
I'm against big moving step pieces that cost $10,000 if they have 15 seconds on stage.
Not doing that anymore.
But our sets are lighting. The venue itself there at Bentonville west is fully modern and automated, so we have a lot of cool options on what we can do.
It's going to be, I mean, a gorgeous show. I cannot wait to show off these costumes. There's a story in that of itself.
[00:20:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, that's what I was thinking, actually, when I first saw that email. And as you were talking about it again, I was like, that right there is a story in and of itself.
No wonder the New York Times picked it up.
All right. Okay. Well, David, that's all I really had for you today. I'm so glad that you guys have got your own space out there and that you're steadily growing.
Where can people find tickets for this production of Cinderella?
[00:21:28] Speaker B: It's easy. You could just go to obtuse, follow the link to Cinderella.
If that's not working for any reason, ozarkballetheater.com will also take you there. You can find us on Facebook, ballet, theater, and Instagram. Everything has a link that'll take you right to Cinderella.
We are selling tickets quite quickly.
Spring shows, you can never really know what to expect, but I'm expecting a very large audience for this.
We are loving having more kids interested in the ballets. So, you know, if you've been looking for something to get everybody into it, I'd suggest coming to see Cinderella. It's got something for everybody.
[00:22:13] Speaker A: Okay. All right. And what's next at Ozark Ballet Theater after Cinderella?
[00:22:21] Speaker B: Well, we've got our summer intensive. We've got four or five outreach shows for free that are just like smaller performances on the, on the schedule. We have obviously, Nutcracker 2024.
You know, we never stop around here, so it'll be, we're looking at adding a show in the, adding a show in our, in our schedule next year, a full length show.
So it's just bigger and better from here.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: All right. All right. Well, we'll be keeping up with you. And thank you again for joining me today to talk about this incredible ballet. I can't wait to see it.
[00:23:00] Speaker B: Thank you so much.
