Tagged: ballet

As a soloist with the Royal Ballet and a principal dancer with the London Ballet Festival, Helen Starr danced many of the lead roles in classical ballets. But she didn’t dance the role of Juliet to Sergei Prokofiev’s score until 1985 when her husband Alun Jones, then artistic director, choreographed his version of the ballet in Louisville.

Now retired from the company, Jones and Starr return every five or six years to stage the version of Shakespeare’s tragic love story that they created together. They open another production this weekend in the Kentucky Center's Whitney Hall.

On our audio diary series The Big Break, two of our artists stretch their artistic muscles in rehearsal this week. Louisville Ballet trainee Claire Horrocks finds the most difficult work in her upcoming Choreographer Showcase is a contemporary dance, because she has focused so intently on ballet movements since she started college. Actors Theatre of Louisville apprentice Samantha Beach takes to the air in rehearsals for the Humana Festival apprentice showcase "Sleep Rock Thy Brain," a collection of one-act plays that all feature flying—as in, strap the actors into harnesses, hoist them high and let them act in mid-air—as a metaphor for sleep. 

After an eight-year hiatus, the Dance Theatre of Harlem Company is back on the road, and its first stop is Louisville.

Founded in New York City in 1969 by Arthur Mitchell, Dance Theatre of Harlem is a rigorous ballet training program with an internationally-acclaimed professional dance company committed to racial diversity in ballet. The organization struggled financially in the years after September 11, 2001, and suspended its company in 2004.