PBT Premieres - Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre

Audience Production Guide
March 6—8, 2015
Benedum Center for the Performing Arts
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Audience Production Guide for Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s
March 6 - 8, 2015
The Benedum Center for the Performing Arts
The Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre Orchestra performances have been generously underwritten
by an individual who prefers to remain anonymous.
The performance of Petite Mort is sponsored by The Benter Foundation.
Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre’s Arts Education programs are also supported by the following:
Allegheny Regional Asset District
Allegheny Technologies, Inc.
Buncher Family Foundation
Anne L. and George H. Clapp Charitable and
Educational Trust
Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation
Cleveland Brothers Equipment Co., Inc.
Direct Energy Business
Dominion Foundation
Eat ‘n Park Restaurants, Inc.
ESB Bank
First Commonwealth Bank
Henry C. Frick Educational Fund of The Buhl
Foundation
The Huntington National Bank
GENCO Supply Chain Solutions
The Grable Foundation
Hefren-Tillotson, Inc.
The Heinz Endowments
Net Health Systems
Peoples Natural Gas
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts
Pennsylvania Department of Community and
Economic Development
PNC Bank
PPG Industries, Inc.
Richard King Mellon Foundation
James M. and Lucy K. Schoonmaker
Foundation
Edith L. Trees Charitable Trust
UPMC Health Plan
Hilda M. Willis Foundation
Cover photo: Julia Erickson and Robert Moore, 2014, photo by Duane Rieder.
This production guide was created by PBT’s Department of Education and Community Engagement, 2015.
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CONTENTS
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PBT Premieres
The Mixed Repertory Format
The Concert
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About the Ballet
The Choreographer—Jerome Robbins
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The Composer—Frédéric Chopin
The Music
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Petite Mort
About the Ballet
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The Choreographer—Jiři Kylián
The Composer—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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Costumes and Props
Sandpaper Ballet
About the Ballet
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The Choreographer—Mark Morris
The Composer—Leroy Anderson
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The Music
The Costumes
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Signature Step: Soft Shoe Dance
Review · Reflect · Respond
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The Benedum Center
Accessibility
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PBT Premieres
PBT Premieres is a mixed repertory program. Featuring three Pittsburgh premieres, PBT presents
imaginative masterworks by world-renowned choreographers Jiřί Kylián, Mark Morris and Jerome
Robbins. With live orchestral accompaniment, the program contrasts the eloquent agility of Kylián’s
striking Petite Mort, the hilarity of Robbins’ clever comedy, The Concert, and the signature wit and
musicality of Morris in his playful ensemble ballet, Sandpaper Ballet.
The Mixed Repertory Format
What is a “Mixed Rep”? When you go to the ballet to see an evening of dance that is not a full
length “story ballet” such as The Sleeping Beauty or The Nutcracker, you are probably attending a
“mixed rep,” a program consisting of several shorter ballets that are performed together. The works
may be plotless or have a storyline. They may be thematically-related or have completely different
styles of choreography, mood, music or historical period. The programming possibilities for a mixed
rep are unlimited.
Mixed rep is short for “mixed repertory.” A ballet company’s repertory is the collection of all the
works that they are prepared to perform, which include both full-length ballets, excerpts from fulllength ballets, and short, one-act pieces. A company alternates between the ballets in their collection, performing a different combination of works each season. The repertory reflects the artistic
style of the company, as well as the technical abilities of the dancers.
About the Ballet—The Concert
Choreography Jerome Robbins
Composer Frédéric Chopin
Music Polonaise in A Major (op. 40, no. 1),
Berceuse (op. 57), Prelude (op. 28, no. 18),
Prelude op. 28, no. 16), Waltz in E-Minor
(posthumous, op. 15), Prelude (op. 28, no. 7),
Mazurka in G Major (posthumous), Prelude (op.
28, no. 4), Ballade (op. 47, no. 3)
Costume Design Irene Sharaff
Lighting Design Jennifer Tipton, recreated by
Les Dickert
Scenic Design Saul Steinberg
Number of Dancers 21
World Premiere New York City Ballet, March
6, 1956
The Concert is the greatest comic ballet ever made. There will never be another one like it.
-Peter Martins, Artistic Director, New York City Ballet
Jerome Robbins’ The Concert is a comic spoof of a
classical music concert. The setting is an all-Chopin
recital where the attendees allow their decidedly imaginative minds to wander. Robbins describes The
Concert this way:
One of the pleasures of attending a concert is the
freedom to lose oneself in listening to the music.
Quite often, unconsciously, mental pictures and images form, and the patterns and paths of these reveries are influenced by the music itself, or its program
notes, or by the personal dreams, problems and fantasies of the listener.
New York City Ballet artists in The Concert, photo © Paul Kolnik, nycballet.com
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When the resulting images are danced, human foibles and recognizable insecurities are revealed
as Robbins brings each fantasy comically and vividly to life. The Concert illustrates Robbins’ remarkable insight into the delightful imperfections of human relationships.
Adapted from The Concert program notes, Doug Fullington, Pacific Northwest Ballet
Watch a clip of New York City Ballet principal, Sterling Hyltin, discussing her role as the Mad Ballerina and the comedy of The Concert.
The Choreographer—Jerome Robbins
Jerome Robbins, born Jerome Rabinowitz in New York City in 1918, is world-renowned for his
work as a choreographer of ballets as well as his work as a director and choreographer in theater,
movies and television. He began his career dancing in the choruses of Broadway productions and tried his hand at choreography in Pennsylvania summer
stock productions, with young actors and dancers like Danny Kaye and Carol
Channing (Robbins’ dance version of Our Town was the Broadway debut of
Kaye as a dancer and of Robbins’ choreography). By 1944 he had joined
American Ballet Theatre where he choreographed the ballet Fancy Free with
the young (and then unknown) composer Leonard Bernstein.
In 1948 George Balanchine invited Robbins to join his new company, New
York City Ballet, and named him associate artistic director. Over the next two
decades Robbins alternated between creating ballets and Broadway productions. In 1951 he choreographed The King and I on Broadway, creating its famous dance numbers—including “Shall We Dance”—as well as an unconventional ballet within the musical, “The Small House of Uncle Thomas,” which used a traditional
Asian dance vocabulary and had an anti-slavery message. The Broadway productions of Peter
Pan (1954), West Side Story (1957), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964) followed.
Robbins was politically active and in the 1940s was a member of the
American Communist Party’s Theatrical Transient Group. In 1953 he was
called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he denounced his affiliation with the Group and named eight colleagues who
had also been members. Though he never publicly commented on the
incident, it is thought that harassment from the FBI, threats of exposing
his homosexuality and fear of being blacklisted on Broadway were behind
his testimony. The experience haunted him: he wrote that he would never
“find a . . . release from the guilt of it all.”
By the late ’60s Robbins returned to New York City Ballet and turned his
creative energies almost fully back to ballet, which was his first love. In all he choreographed more
than 60 ballets, including The Concert, Les Noces, Afternoon of a Faun, Dances At a Gathering, Glass Pieces, and Brandenburg. He received dozens of awards over his career—five Tonys,
two Oscars, one Emmy, the Kennedy Center honors, the French Legion of Honor, and more. On
his death in 1998, from the effects of a stroke, the lights on Broadway were dimmed.
Photo sources: Right: Jewish-theatre.com; Left: Robbins rehearsing West Side Story, pbs.org; © RobbinsRightsTrust
Watch NYCB Artistic Director Peter Martins discuss Robbins’ influence and impact on ballet
Watch the opening dance sequences in the film version of West Side Story
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The Composer—Frédéric Chopin
Frédéric Chopin was born in Poland in 1810. At the age of seven he began
taking piano lessons and before he turned nine, he had played at his first
public concert.
In 1830 Chopin’s Variations, Op. 2, composed when he was 17, were published and his work drew notice across Europe (composer Robert Schumann remarked, “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!”). He moved to Paris in
1831 and his concert debut a year later caused a sensation. He was in great
demand as a teacher, which supported him nicely; and he moved among the
inner circles of the arts and culture elite. He was particularly close friends
with composer Franz Liszt and painter Eugene Delacroix.
In 1838 Chopin began a relationship with author George Sand, which, over
the next 9 years, would be both source of great comfort and emotional turPortrait of Chopin by
moil. It was during this same period that he also contracted and became in- Delacroix
creasingly seriously ill with tuberculosis (he possibly suffered from other diseases as well). The number of works he produced declined each year after 1841, though these later compositions are considered some of his most refined and complex, with a “newly rich sense of
ambivalence.”* Chopin and Sand separated in 1847, and Chopin succumbed to his illnesses in
Paris in 1849. He was 39 years old.
*Ted Libby, The Life and Music of Frederic Chopin, npr.org
The Music
Chopin was the first composer of genius to devote himself wholly to
the piano. His works and virtuoso performances gave the instrument
previously unimagined subtlety and expression. He is known for his
range and diversity of style and for the often extreme technical challenge of his compositions. His contributions to the music of the piano
are vast.
Robbin’s Chopin Ballets
The Concert
1956
Dances at a Gathering
Robbins is considered to be the foremost interpreter of Chopin’s music through dance. In The Concert, the first of four ballets Robbins
choreographed to Chopin, he uses nine works—some very familiar—
to define the personalities and eccentricities of the ballet’s characters. While the result can be very funny, Chopin’s tender melodies
and complex texture create moments within the ballet’s comic veneer
that also are disarmingly real and poignant. Robbins use of Chopin’s
music reveals his own profound insight into the human condition.
1969
Into the Night
1970
Other Dances
1976
Listen to Some of the Music from The Concert
Prelude, op. 28, no. 18
Prelude, op. 28, no. 7
Prelude, op. 28, no. 16
Prelude, op. 28, no. 4
Waltz in E Minor
Ballade, op. 47, no. 3
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Petite Mort
Choreography Jiři Kylián
Composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Music Piano Concerto in A Major [Adagio] KV
488, Piano Concerto in C Major [Andante] KV
467
Lighting Design Joop Caboort
Scenic Design Jiři Kylián
Number of Dancers 12
World Premiere Nederlands Dans Theater,
August 23, 1991
Staging Roslyn Anderson
Costume Design Joke Visser
Kylián’s groundbreaking work . . . is a signal to us all that ballet is not done evolving as an art form.
-Salt Lake Tribune
About the Ballet
Jiří Kylián created this ballet especially for the Salzburg Festival on the
second centenary of Mozart’s death. For his work he chose the slow
parts of two of Mozart’s most beautiful and popular piano concertos.
“This deliberate choice should not be seen as a provocation or thoughtlessness—rather as my way to acknowledge the fact that I am living
and working as part of a world where nothing is sacred, where brutality
and arbitrariness are commonplace. It should convey the idea of two
antique torsos, heads and limbs cut off—evidence of intended mutilation. This doesn’t destroy their beauty but reflects the spiritual power of
their creator.”
The choreography includes six men, six women and six foils. The foils
have the function to be actual dance partners and at times seem more
unruly and obstinate than a partner of flesh and blood. They visualize a
symbolism which is more present than a storyline. Aggression, sexuality, energy, silence, cultivated senselessness, and vulnerability—they
all play a significant part. Petite mort, literally meaning “small death,”
serves as a paraphrase for orgasm in French and Arabic.
-Kylián Foundation
Artists: Julia Erickson and Robert Moore; photo by Duane Rieder
The Choreography
Kylián’s style in Petite Mort is a blending of the precision and rigor of ballet with the “placement and
weight use of modern” dance. The dancing is muscular and athletic but also fluid and graceful. The
clarity of execution demanded by his choreography has been compared to that of George Balanchine. The stage pictures Kylián’s choreography creates are abstract, surreal, humorous, shocking.
Petite Mort is one of five ballets Kylián choreographed between 1986 and 1991 called the Black
and White Ballets, which all explore sexual politics and identity.
Watch an excerpt from Petite Mort danced by Nederlands Dans Theatre. Hear commentary about
Petite Mort by répétiteurs Urtzi Aranburu and Roslyn Anderson in these videos from The Washington Ballet and Hubbard Street Dance.
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The Choreographer—Jiři Kylián
Jiři Kylián was born in Prague, Czech Republic. He trained at the Prague
Conservatory and at the Royal Ballet School, London. He began his choreographic career with Stuttgart Ballet (1970) before moving to the Nederlands Dans Theatre (NDT), where he became director in 1978. His many
works include Sinfonietta, with music by Janáček (1979), the all-male Soldiers' Mass (1980), L'Enfant et les Sortilèges (1984), and three based on
Aboriginal culture: Nomads (1981), Stamping Ground (1982),
and Dreamtime (1983). Through the years, Kylián has moved away from
lyrical works to abstract and often surrealistic ballets such as No More
Play (1988), Falling Angels (1989), Sweet Dreams (1990), Sarabande
(1990), and Petite Mort (1991). In April 1995, Kylián celebrated 20 years
with NDT by mounting a large-scale dance production, Arcimbaldo. On
that occasion, he received one of the Netherlands’ highest honors, becoming Officer in de Orde van Oranje Nassau. In 1997, Kylián won the
Edinburgh Festival Critics' Award and received an honorary doctorate at The Juilliard School in
New York. Kylián also received the Benois de la Danse award in 1998 and the Laurence Olivier
Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance among many other awards and honors. Kylián is currently resident choreographer and artistic advisor of NDT and artistic advisor of the Saitama Arts
Foundation in Japan.
Watch a clip from Forgotten Memories, a 2011 documentary about Kylián’s life and work.
The Composer—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27, 1756 in Salzburg, Austria. As a young child at the age of three, Mozart would observe and learn from
his sister’s piano lessons with their father. Mozart composed his first minuet at
the age of five, and he performed publicly for the first time at age six. Mozart’s
father, Leopold, took Mozart and his older sister, Maria Anna, on European
tours to perform as child prodigies. When Mozart was 17, he was named the
Assistant Concert Master for the Royal Court of Salzburg. He moved to Vienna in 1781, where he would compose many of his best-known works. He married soon after arriving in Vienna and had 6 children, only 2 of whom survived
past infancy.
Throughout his life, Mozart was incredibly prolific, composing over 600 symSource
phonies, operas, sonatas, string ensembles, and concertos, and creating some of the most important masterpieces of the Classical era. He had a profound influence on later composers, including Ludwig Von Beethoven, Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky and Gustav Mahler (whose last words on his
deathbed were “Mozart! Mozart!”). Mozart himself became ill in September of 1791, probably with
rheumatic or another fever. He conducted the premiere of his new opera, The Magic Flute, in late
September but by November he was bedridden. He died on December 5, 1791, leaving his last
work, Requiem, unfinished. He was 35 years old.
Listen to the Piano Concerto in A Major and the Piano Concerto in C Major, used in Petite Mort.
Read more about Mozart’s life and music at Classical.net.
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Costumes and Props
Designer Joke Visser worked closely with Jiři Kylián to create
Petite Mort’s minimalist yet striking design. At the start of the ballet the men have swords and the women appear in stiff black ball
gowns, which we soon understand are actually props—sculptures
on wheels. This scene immediately sets up the ballet’s sexual
tension: as The New York Times describes it, the “men have their
weapons, the women, their armor.” The look is vaguely Victorianesque, including the gleaming, corseted undergarment-like costumes for both men and women.
Photo source
About Ballet—Sandpaper Ballet
Choreography Mark Morris
Composer Leroy Anderson
Music Sleigh Ride (Overture), The Typewriter,
Costume Design Isaac Mizrahi
Lighting Design James F. Ingalls
Number of Dancers 25
World Premiere San Francisco Ballet, April 27,
1999
Trumpeter’s Lullaby, Sarabande, Balladette, Jazz
Pizzicato, Jazz Legato, Fiddle Faddle, The Girl in
Satin, Song of the Bells, The Syncopated Clock
Sandpaper Ballet lifts you out of your seat with its sheer, rib-tickling insouciance . . . if you hate ballet, you will love it. If you worship ballet, you will understand it. And if you’ve never been to a ballet
before in your entire life, you will convert instantly.
-San Francisco Examiner, 1999
Mark Morris created Sandpaper Ballet in 1999 for San Francisco Ballet (SFB). He’d wanted to create a big orchestral piece for SFB and
decided on the music of Leroy Anderson. The composer’s music was
a pop culture staple on radio and television, familiar and accessible to
millions—Morris himself had loved it as a kid.
While Morris creates both ballet and modern dance works, he is a
master at exploring and expanding ballet technique. He created Sandpaper Ballet with a traditional ballet vocabulary, but there is a jazzy
feel and a swing to it that Morris draws from the tempo and orchestration of the music. The ballet is “sectional,” with each section having its
own movement theme or feeling. Morris designed movement motifs to
recur throughout the ballet, but uses the motif or movement phrase
differently in different sections. He explores how changing the location of the movement within the
ballet can change how that same movement feels to the audience (and the dancer), and how it fundamentally expands the expressive capability of the movement.
Répétiteur Tina Fehlandt visited PBT several times in the last six months to rehearse and “set” the
ballet on PBT. When teaching a work to a company, she refrains from showing the dancers any footage of another company performing the ballet, preferring to have the dancers “physicalize the movement without copying” it. She does try to give dancers a way to approach the movement—for Sandpaper Ballet she suggested they watch old footage of Fred Astaire to understand the easy grace and
casual elegance that Morris envisioned for the ballet’s movement style.
Photo: mmdg.org
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Morris’ work is notable for its craftsmanship, musicality and ingenuity, as well as its accessibility to a
broad audience. In Sandpaper, the music and rhythm immediately connect the audience to what’s
happening on stage, to the sense of community Morris’ choreography creates, and to the sheer joy
of movement.
The Choreographer— Mark Morris
Photo: Sarah Schatz, courtesy
Mark Morris Dance Group
Mark Morris was born on August 29, 1956, in Seattle, Washington, where he
studied with Verla Flowers and Perry Brunson. He formed the Mark Morris Dance Group in 1980, and has since created more than 140 works for
the company. From 1988-1991, he was Director of Dance at
the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, the national opera house of
Belgium. In 1990, he founded the White Oak Dance Project with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Much in demand as a ballet choreographer, Morris has created
eighteen ballets since 1986 and his work is in the repertory of companies
worldwide. He also works extensively in opera, directing and choreographing at the Metropolitan Opera, The Royal Opera, Covent Garden,
among others. PBT performed Morris’ works Maelstrom in 2012 and Drink to
Me Only with Thine Eyes in 2013.
Read more about Mark Morris at the Mark Morris Dance Group website. Listen to a 2006 interview
with Mark Morris on NPR.
The Composer—Leroy Anderson
“Leroy Anderson was a genius. He worked on a remarkable
level of melodic inspiration, tunes pouring out of him like
water out of a fountain.”
—Henry Fogel, League of American Orchestras
Leroy Anderson was born on June 29, 1908 in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. He began studying piano and music at the
New England Conservatory of Music at 11 and later attended
Harvard University where he earned his M.A. in Music in
1930. Excelling at linguistics, Anderson continued to work
toward a PhD in German and Scandinavian languages. He
also worked as a music tutor at Radcliffe College.
Anderson thought music wouldn’t offer a stable career and intended to become a language teacher.
While still in grad school, he became Director of the Harvard University Band. Here, he wrote arrangements that caught the attention of Arthur Fiedler, who was director of the Boston Pops Orchestra. In 1938, the Pops performed Anderson’s first composition, Jazz Pizzicato, followed by several
other compositions.
Anderson was drafted into the Army during World War II where he was a translator and interpreter in
the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps. He was later promoted to Captain and assigned to the
Pentagon as the Chief of the Scandinavian Department of Military Intelligence. During this time he
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Anderson left the military after the war and in 1946 composed Sleigh Ride (the overture of Sandpaper Ballet) —during a summer heatwave in Connecticut. His compositions in the late ’40s and ‘50s
were huge commercial successes: Sleigh Ride was the first pure orchestral piece to reach number
one on Billboard’s pop music chart; and Blue Tango was the first instrumental to sell 1 million copies. Anderson’s works were also used on television shows and in commercials. He composed the
score for the Tony-winning musical Goldilocks, and appeared periodically on PBS as a guest conductor for the Boston Pops. He won numerous awards, including being named to the Songwriter’s
Hall of Fame and having a star placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (both posthumous). Anderson died in 1975.
Listen to Anderson’s gold record hit, Blue Tango, and The Typewriter and Syncopated Clock from
Sandpaper Ballet.
The Music
Audiences may think they don’t know Anderson’s music, but they’re wrong. Play a few bars of almost any of his pieces and you’ll see a flash of recognition light up their faces. In addition to
“Sleigh Ride,” perhaps most famous is “The Syncopated Clock,” which viewers of The Late Show,
the popular late-night movie show on WCBS-TV that premiered in 1951 and ran for more than 25
years, would instantly recognize. The song, written by Anderson in 1945, was his first major hit,
claiming a spot in the top 12 on the Billboard charts in 1951 and reappearing on national TV as the
“Final Jeopardy” music on Jeopardy during the 1970s. Some of Anderson’s songs feature unconventional sounds, like that aforementioned typewriter and, in the dance’s namesake—“Sandpaper
Ballet” (notably absent from its score)—sandpaper.
-Adapted from Sandpaper Ballet program notes by Cheryl A. Ossola for San Francisco Ballet
The Costumes
I love the idea of this hyper, very urbane vision of the countryside. It’s a city person’s dream of a
landscape. That color green is so happy and crazy.
-Costume designer Isaac Mizrahi
Sandpaper Ballet’s costumes were designed by fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, a long-time close
friend of choreographer Mark Morris. PBT is renting the costumes for our production from San Francisco Ballet.
The costumes are simple structurally—leotards for men and
leotards with skirts for women— but the graphic effect they create as an ensemble is both whimsical and dramatic. From the
ribcage up, the costumes are a beautiful sky blue with white
silkscreened clouds. The rest of the costume is an intense, radiant green. Sandpaper Ballet répétiteur Tina Fehlandt says to
“think horizon” when watching the ballet. When the dancers line
up in a row or stand in a grid pattern, the effect the costumes
create is of a landscape—a bucolic green meadow set against the summer sky. Each dancer’s costume has to be adjusted so that the horizon line is at the same height on each person. When the
dancers move the effect disappears, but they continually regroup, reforming the horizon line, and reinforcing a sense of cohesion and community among the dancers.
Costume rendering by Isaac Mizrahi, mmdg.org
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Signature Step: Softshoe Dancing
Mark Morris created Sandpaper Ballet in homage to soft
shoe dancing. Soft shoe, which gained popularity in early
20th century Vaudeville reviews, is a type of tap dancing
without the metal taps on the bottom of the shoes. It’s
characterized by smooth, relaxed, floating movements
and tapping or brushing the foot against the floor to generate rhythm. Sometimes dancers sprinkle sand on the
floor to magnify the sound of the sliding feet.
Leroy Anderson paid tribute to the dance form and to the
sounds it creates in his Sandpaper Ballet (Morris took the
name of this work for the entire ballet). Anderson created
the signature sound by having his percussionists attach
sandpaper to wooden blocks and rub them together—
they used coarse, medium and fine sandpaper to create
different effects.
Morris incorporated the lilting, softly percussive qualities
of soft shoe dancing throughout the ballet. Watch for it
particularly in the mens’ dancing style.
Listen for the sandpaper sounds in Anderson’s Sandpaper Ballet; watch a video of actor Buddy
Ebsen performing a soft shoe routine (start at 1:05).
For Further Thought
1. Thinking about PBT Premieres as a collective experience, did you find any connections between
any of the ballets in tonight’s performance? How did the ballets relate and speak to one another?
How did the ballets challenge the aesthetics of the others?
2. Thinking about each individual ballet, what moment(s) particularly captivated you?
3. What were the differences in the ways that each ballet utilized the music.
4. In The Concert, how do you think the dancers interacted with each other and told their stories
without speaking out loud?
5. In Petite Mort, how do you think the quality of movement in partnering with the fencing foils was
different than the quality of movement in partnering with another dancer?
6. In Sandpaper Ballet, in the opening piece, “The Typewriter,” the dancers were very organized in
rows and columns on stage, similar to a typewriter. How did you see the choreographer change
the overall arrangement of the dancers on the stage to express the unique arrangement of each
piece of music?
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The Benedum Center for the Performing Arts
The Benedum Center for the Performing Arts is the
crown jewel of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and the
Cultural District in downtown Pittsburgh. It was renovated in 1987 and is on the National Register of Historic Landmarks. The 2800 seat theatre used to be
the Stanley Theater, still visible on the lighted marquees outside. It has the third largest stage in the
United States measuring 144 feet wide by 78 feet
deep. The Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, Pittsburgh
Opera, and Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera all use the
Benedum for their performances.
Learn more about the Benedum Center and investigate the Stanley Theatre’s role in music history
here in Pittsburgh.
Accessibility
PBT is committed to being an inclusive arts organization that serves everyone in the greater Pittsburgh community through its productions and programs.
In conjunction with the Benedum Center for Performing Arts, the following accessibility services
are provided to patrons:

Wheelchair Accessibility

Braille and Large Print Programs

Assistive Listening Devices

Audio Recordings of select program notes

Audio-described Performances. An on-demand service. Please call or email to schedule!

Should you have a special request that is not listed above or have any questions about our accessibility services, please do not hesitate to call the Education Department at 412-454-9109
or [email protected]. A two-week advance notice for accommodations not listed
above, such as ASL interpretation or captioning, is kindly requested.
For more information about all of the accessiblity services at the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts, please visit their accessibility page.
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